It can be funny or should I say, humiliating how a “smart” person can do something “really smart”, and prove that they are not all that smart after all, or at least still do dumb things. And well, I found that out first hand. At work we have the blast rig mounted on a semi trailer with the blast pot on the back, over the back axels. When we fill the blast pot up there is about 40,000lbs of weight on the back axels. In case you have trouble wrapping your head around that much weight, well lets just say…..you would not want it to run over your toe. Well any way about a week ago we had just filled it up and I was moving it to were we were blasting and as I rounded a corner I saw a big mud puddle and mud around it. So I swung the truck to miss the mud, but, (ya, “but“, that’s right, things don’t always happen as planned, so we say, “this is what I was trying to do, “but” this is what happened”) I did not swing wide enough and the back axels, the ones that had the blast pot on that we had just filled, the ones with about 40,000lbs on them, just caught the edge of the mud and slid down into the mud puddle, and everything stopped moving. I was about to learn what it takes to get a over loaded semi trailer, stuck up to its axels in mud, unstuck. Plan A: Where we were working had a big four wheel Cat loader, Surely that could pull us out. Ten minuets later and a broken chain we could see that although all four wheels were spinning on both the loader and the semi, we were going nowhere. Plan B: Where we were working also had a cable winch truck. That will surely pull it on out. Fifteen minuets later we saw the winch truck trying to pull the semi out, only instead of the semi getting pulled out toward the winch truck, the winch truck was getting pulled in toward the semi. Plan C: Well if you need two, and all you have is two ones, what do you do? That’s right, you add them together. So now we have both the winch truck and the four wheeled Cat loader hooked up to the front of the semi. With the winch pulling and doing all it could to keep from moving, the Cat loader and the semi spinning all four wheels, ever so slowly the semi starts to move. And that’s what it took to get a overloaded semi trailer, stuck up to its axels in mud unstuck. So you may ask me what I learned from the whole ordeal? I learned a lot of things, such as, semis are not good in the mud. When a semi is stuck up to its axels in mud getting out and pushing does not help. Your boss/dad wonders what in the world you were thinking, and you also wonder the same thing. And last of all, getting a semi stuck up to its axles in mud does not make ruts, it make trenches, to the tune of two and a half to three feet deep. So drive safe, and don’t cut your corners too short.

Josiah's Cockpit