What better to do on a Sat night

About 2pm friday afternoon I got a call from work asking me if I could work saturday afternoon for a few hours as there was some stuff from a show on down at Darling Harbour that needed to be picked up. I was to drive one of the old Bulk trucks instead of one of our tail gate trucks as the goods were too big to fit in them. After a few minutes I said ok, thinking about four extra hours of work wouldn't hurt the pay packet, and Being a single guy with no plans, I had nothing better to do.

The Turtle and I were assigned the job and after getting our trucks and driving down, we had about an hour and a half of sitting in a queue, we were then allowed to head on up to see the good and load on up. The problem being the goods werent ready to go, so we had to help wrap and shrink the goods.

We finally got the goods ready to load and loaded up the tailgate truck with all the little machines and stands and stand junk. We then had another 40 minute wait to get a forklift in to load my truck for me. There were about 5 guys from GBC there waiting for us to load which I found different, usually we just load the goods by ourselfes. After awhile we were loaded and they were watching everything we were doing, and asking me how I was going to load and where the straps were for the truck to tie down the machines. Well we were given ropes from work to tie down everything, so here I was trying to tie it all down decently and getting watched.

The problem with this being that in our tailgate trucks we have straps, so in 8 years of driving for star track express I have never learnt how to tie a rope properly. If you look at the picture above, the little machine on the left is worth about $500,000,00 and the bigger machine on the right is worth just over a million dollars. The Turtle didn't have any clue on ropes at all and all I had was the trusty truckies knot, that I'm guessing I learnt from someone when I was on the farm. The truckies knot was the go, so we tied on down and then the guys from GBC asked us how long it would be till we arrived back at their work. Both of us looked at them with a blank look on our faces and said, what do you mean, we were told the goods were coming back to you on monday. Seems like some miscommunication had been going on, we were told the big machine had to be plugged back in with in a few hours, so we said, guess were going back to your work then.

They decided to head off and meet us back there and we finished up securing the load. Let me tell you it was one of the slowest trips back down Parramatta road and further on, I was being alot more gentle than usual with that much money on the back of my truck, along with a smaller $200,000,00 machine. It was like 10.30 at night by this stage and we'd started at 4.30, so we were both hungry and thirsty, so we had a Maccas stop along the way. I grimaced at every little bump and hole in the roads, but when we got back there was no dramas, the knots had held and nothing had shifted, so the turtle was very impressed and asked me to show him how to do the knot. After unloading and heading back to work, we finally walked out at 12.35am. Not quite the 4-5 hours of overtime I thought we'd get, but the pay packet will benefit im sure, or should I say Kevin will be loving the tax from us. So as you can see we do do a little work everynow and again, nothing hard this night, just expensive, but thats our part of the company and why I have a job.