Good, quality body work takes time and isn’t cheap. If it hadn’t been for Bill teaching me how by letting me sand a lot of his projects to help offset my cost, it would have easily run into many thousands of dollars. It was painfully slow, but a year after we started, it was ready for paint.
I wanted it to be navy blue with a gold stripe. Bill, an old school Ford guy, said, “I’m painting it black. If you don’t like it, take it somewhere else.” As much as I wasn’t happy about it, he had done a lot of work on it for nothing more than the cost of my labour around his shop. So, black it was.
I was working for a hay hauling outfit then. Usually on the road 7 days a week and with barely any time off. The May long weekend was coming up in a month and I told my boss that I needed that weekend off, no matter what. He said no problem but to remind him a week ahead of time, which I did.
When the weekend came, it was Friday night and I was at a party, at someone’s place that I didn’t know. At around 10, someone yelled out my name and said there was a call for me. (No cell phones back then) Surprised, I took the call and it was my boss. He said he needed me to bring a trailer to the yard in the morning. I was furious at him! I had given him a months notice, reminded him constantly and he knew how important it was for me to get my old truck painted. He said, “Well, if you don’t do it, don’t bother coming back to work next week.” And then he hung up. Talk about a buzz kill.
I called him back. I asked him what the job entailed and he told me, “Just go over to Country Feeds and pick up a trailer that has some wet hay on it, bring it back to the yard and unload it, then you can have the rest of the weekend off. It wasn’t fair, or nice, but I needed the job, so I said I’d do it. I drove to the yard and slept in my truck.
I got up early and bobtailed to the feed store where I found the trailer. A little wet eh? It was completely loaded and soaked to the belly of the wagon. A normal pup trailer load of hay was around 20 tons, but the tires were almost flat from the weight and it had to have weighed at least twice that. Plus the tires were parked on the grass and sunk into the dirt. So much for a quick job! It took a couple of forklifts to get it up high enough to back under, and a couple of hours later I was headed back to the yard. It wasn’t too far, about 10 miles, but, dang it was heavy. If a DOT had stopped me I would have been in very big trouble.
I got to the yard and he told me to put it in the pole barn and unload it there. “Unload it! You didn’t say anything about unloading it last night! I have things to do!” Once again, he said if I didn’t do it not to bother coming back on Tuesday. Fricken jerk.
So, with the help of a couple of boys from the feed store, we got to work. The boss said to place them on the ground, wet side up, about 2 feet apart. I said to the boys, you heard him, wet side up. A bale of alfalfa normally weighs about 100lbs. But these things were soaking wet and I could barely move them. They had to be closer to 200lbs each. All I could do was drag them to the side of the load and kick them off. They literally splashed when the hit the ground. The boys couldn’t figure out what was the wet side, so I said just put the wettest side up. What else could we do?
After an hour of wrestling these green water bombs, the boss came in. He immediately started yelling at me. “I told you to put them wet side up! Did you leave your brains at home? WTF is the matter with you?!”
That was it. I took off my chaps, which were soaking wet, and threw them at him. “I QUIT! You don’t pay me nearly enough to talk to me that way! Screw you!”
I got in my van and drove straight to the body shop…