Pallet Jack@$$
So we got this "all terrain" pallet jack thingie for moving stuff around the yard without the tractor. All terrain except our own. 995 bucks down the drain. I advertised it for sale on Facebook Marketplace.
The only response I received? "Interesting".
What the heck kind of a response to a classified ad is "Interesting?"
That should have been my first clue.
Anyway, I had it at $900. All it had done here was sit around and look stupid. Then Mr. Interesting sent another message: "Would you take $600?"
"No". I don't like to lead people on. I want rid of it, but I'm willing to ride it out a bit before I lose 395 bucks on it just for the pleasure of picking it up.
Then, "I'll give you $800 delivered to Ottawa".
$800 picked up here in our yard would certainly pique my interest. That's an 80 percent recoup on a bad investment. I'm good at bad investments. Yeah, I'd take that. Blowing another hundred bucks worth of gas taking it to East End Ottawa is a pretty hard pass though.
"No".
Then I saw a steel bin cabinet he was advertising himself. It held 138 plastic parts bins. Just the thing I need for tidying up my home shop. $1150.00. I could tell he wouldn't pay what something like that was worth if his head was being held down in a toilet. He likely got it for under 250 bucks. Maybe trade bait would work. He wants this thing I've got, and maybe I can get something useful to me in exchange. Him not having to pay money would be a dandy worm on the hook; "I'll trade you even for that bin cabinet, and bring the jack to Ottawa".
"That unit is sold". And the ad disappeared just like that. "But I have another one. I'll send you pics". The good ol' bait & switch...
I counted them: 30 bins out of the 138 that should be there. It's just shy a thousand bucks of bins. "No, the other one had all the bins."
"No it didn't."
I'm not friggin' blind. There were several pictures. It had its full compliment of bins in the doors and on the back wall.
"I get $2500 for ones like this". Then why did you advertise it for $1150.00? And a brand new one is only $2700 with all the bins and no scratches.
"The other one had all its bins. Not interested". I can find an empty bin cabinet for a heck of a lot less than that. Put a thousand dollars of new bins in it and it's back up to snuff for half the price of a new unit.
"No it didn't. Okay. Take care".
Yeah, you too...
Then he put out an ad looking for an all terrain pallet jack thingy himself, "Working or not. Any condition. If you have one for sale please contact me."
He wants one of these thingies pretty bad. And I had a pang of guilt thinking he needed it. It bugged me all night, so I sent him a message: "I'll take $900 cash, delivered to Ottawa this afternoon". I had a broker run to do and there were two big long boxes in it, so I already had to take the truck anyway. Take the trailer and that dumb doohickie thingy and recoup some money I blew while I was already there.
"I'll take it". I knew he would. The only other one for sale was 6 hours away and they want $2000 for it.
"I'll be there at 2PM".
"Perfect".
A bit of a late start didn't help, but we should make up the time on the highway. Well, except for Highway 17 was quite a bit slower than I was used to. Friday. We never made a broker run on a summer Friday. Not good. Well, once we hit Hunt Club Road it will be a lot lighter. Except it wasn't. No, Highway 17 was the Good Ol' Days compared to Hunt Club. Hunt Club was so darn slow of bumper to bumper stop and go traffic that it took us half an hour longer to cross the city than ever before. Stopped 3 times for one light different times. Nobody up ahead seemed to be able to figure out which one was their right foot and put it down on the pedal on the right when the light turned green. Grimly, I watched more than one green light turn red again before we ever started moving. After an absolutely interminable amount of time, we made it to Limebank and broke away from the insane traffic on Hunt Club. Well, except for the very first light turning amber and then going red on us. 2 o'clock, and we haven't even gotten to the broker drop, much less down to Greely to get rid of this goofy thing. Sitting at the 17th red light of 19 potential (I've counted them, trust me), my fingers were crushing and wringing the steering wheel. Scottish folk are wonderful people, but we're not exactly renowned for our over abundance of patience. My back element simmer was at risk of becoming a front burner boil. Sharon tried to calm my growing frustration; "It's the only light until Leitrim". Yeah, and it got us, after every friggin' light all the way across the city, while cyclists and even pedestrians passed us, and at a leisurely pace, not a care in the world...
It all seemed so simple when we left home, but now we were going to be late and we didn't have a phone number to call him on.
We passed the South side of the airport, heading to our drop, the traffic having caught up with us again. Finally getting to Leitrim, we hit yet another red light. I'm sure it was someone Scottish who coined the phrase, 'More than one way to skin a cat', and I wheeled away from Leitrim Road onto Albion. Fenton Road, our first destination, runs diagonally between Leitrim and Albion, so instead of going ahead on Leitrim - when the light turned - and onto Fenton, I went down Albion and swerved onto Fenton and arrived at our broker drop.
We have to back in beside a tractor trailer up to a set of steps beside the loading dock. There's only enough room to do it with a car or the truck. The trailer has to be unhitched and left in the yard. I hastily got out and unhitched it. Jumping back in the truck, I was dismayed when the upright handle of that dumb thing on the trailer followed us in the mirror. Good grief, I was in so much of a hurry I didn't lift it off of the ball. I jumped back out and went to lift the coupler off of the ball. Oh yeah: that thing weighs 320 pounds, and it was right at the front of the trailer, so all on the hitch, plus the frontal trailer weight itself. There was a time when I would have just snatched it up, but thanks to time and a phenomenally botched hernia operation, that time is past, so I started feverishly cranking the jack handle. The coupler came up off of the ball, and I jumped back in the truck. I had to be careful not to hit the crash bolster that protected a priceless garbage bin on the opposite side of the broker's truck and backed in. We unloaded the truck and I slammed Sharon with her door when I closed it too soon on her. Her Grim Reaper look darkened her face, but I shook it off and jumped back in.
The trailer is normally pretty easy to swing around and reconnect. Not today. No, the jack tire was flat. Those stupid Princess Auto small Chinese tires are always flat. Wheelbarrow tire? Flat. Lawn tractor tire? Flat. Garden tiller tire? Flat. Snowblower tire? Flat. The darn things are flat by the time you get home from the store. I'm sure there's a full time employee whose only job and responsibility is to keep those rubber fishnets pumped up to fool you into buying them and taking them home to only wind up overgrown stress squishy toys once you get there.
So, try to swing the trailer around 180 degrees on a completely flat jack tire. It didn't want to come, but I felt a very unwelcome tear in my ventral hernia while I was trying to do it. The Scottishness came out immediately. Anyone watching would have seen my face redden like an abattoir floor. I tightened my gut to keep it from tearing more, gritted my teeth in a Doberman's snarl, and said, "C'MON, yeww sunnuva... " When a Scotsman says that, whatever it is comes - or else. It did.
I speedily hooked it back up and forced myself to double check the coupler latch, safety latch, safety chains, and lighting harness plug. No use getting this far and then losing the whole kit and kaboodle in the ditch.
We barreled out of Fenton onto the East end of Leitrim and headed for Bank Street and Greely. More of the same traffic light nonsense at Bank, but we were finally on our way down to Greely. Well, that was, until we came to 'construction' that was the DE-struction of Bank Street. A large length of the street in a low area was just... gone. No road. Just excavators and piles of dirt for half a mile. And a 'Detour' sign that didn't happen to tell you which way to go. Just 'Detour'. So naturally we chose the wrong way. A very quick, fevered tour of a curvy-streeted residential area followed. I wasn't one bit impressed with the architecture, the plantings, the benches, the sidewalks, or the streets themselves, just with the fact that several people together made the decision to tell you to detour right at the edge of the construction, but not consider it worth their time or effort to inform you which way to go.
Coming at a high rate of vehicular speed and heart rate back to where we had started, we crossed to the other side. I cannot for the life of me describe how absolutely delighted I was to find out that there was no way out of there either, but a 270 degree loop of a Canadian Tire in the vicinity happened at a clip which may not have been recorded before yesterday, especially with a truck and a trailer.
It just didn't seem to occur to the road construction crew to place their 'Detour' signs where you could actually detour to. Why bother yourself with a silly little thing like that? Maybe they were sitting down there somewhere with binoculars, splitting themselves at the vehicular hijinks that followed. "Youtube, Youtube!"
Yeww sunnuva...
Back out to Bank, we headed back North. There had to be a way to get across that valley a road or two away on a parallel path. And it was going to be done in a hurry. It came to us that it might have been considerate of the guy we were going to see to tell us that the road we needed to use to get there wasn't even there, but ohh no...
We found our way across the low area and ended back out at Bank Street. Our destination was about 3000 civic numbers down the road. Have you ever noticed how long 3000 911 numbers takes to go by when you're in a hurry? It doesn't happen right away, but my last remaining dark hairs seemed to take their leave right about the same time.
Finally getting there, we are met with a storage compound, complete with a keypad coded locking sliding chain link gate. And, of course, no one in the adjacent sentry booth. Nothing at all in the adjacent sentry booth. Just four walls and a bare floor. But there's an 'Office' sign. I follow the sign around to another sign, and to a door. Of course, the door is locked. And there's a sign on it: "Call *** *** **** to speak with an operator", and, "Don't call if... with quite an extensive list of reasons not to call. I guess Jehovah's Witnesses, Telus, Avon, your car's extended warranty, and the unrelated argument someone had with their Aunt Tillie the Thursday the week before Thanksgiving probably had gotten under the operator's skin. Or he didn't want his quality meth down time unnecessarily interrupted. Whatever the reason, we weren't getting in and they didn't want us calling them about it.
Well now we were in a pickle. We had no phone number for the guy. We thought we were coming to a business, not a sprawling storage compound we couldn't even enter. The words "stooge" and "turkey" started repeatedly rolling off of my lips with a pretty heartfelt emphasis. I'm sure there were 4 wrinkles in my nose the way it was scrunched up when I uttered those terms of endearment.
Sharon had to pee. No place to do that in a civil fashion here, and no place to do it in an uncouth fashion without having her tetanus shots up to date, so we had to leave to find a gas station. I won't bore you with the details of how far we drove through the countryside without finding a single gas station or Timmies anywhere, but the third time we came to a town sign and there was no town of any sort to speak of much less a gas station or a Timmies, through very tightly clenched teeth I growled, "Holy flyin' flip..."
Sharon acknowledged, "I knew there was a 'Holy flyin' flip...' coming. I'm just surprised it took this long". That is my expression of wit's end, someone's going to pay dearly, utter exasperation.
As we were leaving the unkempt parking lot of the storage compound, I thought of the guy's name and Sharon managed to look it up and call. Of course: No answer. Some time just before my 'Holy flyin' flip...' she got a text message from him: "I missed your call". Well, no sh!+ Sherlock. You think we didn't realize that? Thanks for letting us know. That message conveyed all the information of "Interesting". Something tells me this guy wasn't valedictorian at any graduation ceremony he may have been an active part of.
Sharon asked me if I wanted her to phone that number. I was afraid of what might come out of my mouth right about then or if I might bite her phone in two if I got talking to him, and solemnly shook my head 'no'. She understood and likely thought it prudent at that point.
I was totally in a 'Frigg this - let's go home' state of mind, but, a little while later, he somehow stirred up the presence of mind to phone us. He said he'd "go back", and I made sure to ask him what he'd be driving.
After the GPS (Growl Provoking Sh!+ometer) made us unnecessarily zig zag through a residential area from where we'd gotten lost to trying to find a functioning thunder bucket, we ended back out on Bank Street north of the place. You know: instead of taking a sensible direct route and all. I remarked I have never driven so far in my life without seeing one single, solitary gas station the entire way. Sharon said that it was pretty rural, so maybe not so much need anymore. A bit testily, I replied, "See all those cars in those yards? What do they run on? GAS. Where's the freakin' gas stations?!" She had to concede me that one, but the ultimate answer remained exactly that way: Unanswered.
Sharon informed me she no longer had to use the lady's room; "I think my body has absorbed the urine." I don't know about you but that doesn't sound healthy in the slightest to me. I've been there myself though. It's not that she was actually relieved. It was kind of like realizing that the bear that is crashing through the woods behind you is only a Grizzly and not a Kodiak. Bear that in mind.
Arriving back at the compound, we pulled right in behind our new favorite guy in the whole wide world. He punched the secret entry number of Control, and the gate slowly rolled open. Control agents no longer drop down a pay phone booth to a headquarters below; they protect the free world from CHAOS agents from the everyday auspices of a storage facility. Hidden in plain sight, y'know.
Driving towards the back, how ever far away that may have been, we were treated to the sight of the most ramshackle, sundry and varied, nothing looks like anything else storage facility I have ever seen in my life. It looked more like a refugee's tent city than a storage business. But, who am I to judge? There were sea cans scattered here and there as far as the eye could sea see. Chain link fence delineated the more 'upscale' units. But tarps were the order of the day. I was always expecting someone's head to pop out from under the ubiquitous blue or green or camo tarps covering unseen things, or strung from them, or from the multi-coloured corrugated containers. No two containers were the same colour. No two units appeared the same size. The whole thing was just a tad bizarre. The only orderly thing was the completely uncluttered crushed stone driveway through what we could see from where we were. It was exactly the kind of place you'd expect Snake Plisskin to go to recconoiter strategic business relations from. It just needed to be dark and backlit with 1980's Hollywood blue mist wafting across it to be perfect.
For all the countless 'units' there were, we never saw another soul come or go either time we were there. That just added to the weirdness of it all.
He looked the spitting image of both of our imaginations. It takes all kinds to make the world.
We arrived at our guy's unit, and it reminded me of a slapped together tarpaper shack that an old timer lived in near Foresters Falls when I was a little kid. We always wondered how he didn't freeze to death in the winter but he always seemed to weather it just fine. This was thrown together just like that.
He looked at the jack, and asked a few questions, and then said, "I'll take that". I thought it was a done deal this morning, not now. If he didn't take it, after all of the preceding up until now he was going to get something else, and my nerves were more than tuned to deliver it. "Good choice...", I said to myself.
Without any sorrow or misgivings whatsoever we left that strange and weird place and headed back up Bank Street. As a note aside, it seemed to kind of round out the varied and motley locations we have found ourselves doing business in over our time together.
We came to an intersection that had a mini commerce area and an A&W. Perfect. Sharon can wring the absorbed pee back out of her bodily tissues and I could probably go for the same. Then we could get a bite to eat.
After relieving ourselves in the appropriate washrooms (read that again, wokies), we went to order our quick vittles. A whistle dog was on the menu! "Two of those, please!"
"Abluabillaba", came the reply from the New Canadian behind the counter.
"Errr, pardon?"
"Abluabillaba."
"Uhh... you don't have any, right?" I could tell by the negative shake of her head, not her dialogue.
"Noo. Abluabillaba."
Okay, this isn't going to be as easy as we momentarily before misled ourselves to believe. There were two other obviously New Canadians sitting on the takeout window ledge. Guys. The one had his arm around the other one's shoulder and they were totally engrossed in what was taking place on the screen of the one's phone. Maybe they could actually understand and speak English and got promoted to Smartphone Surveillance. They sure weren't one bit interested in us so Dhriti it was.
"A Momma burger combo and a Poppa burger combo, please."
"Abolibalu?"
"Uhhh... "
"Abolibalu?"
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