Today I had a big, fat DOH! moment, that I thought some of you might enjoy or empathize with. A few days ago, we had about eight inches of snow here in Jersey. Since then, the mostly shoveled snow on the driveway has turned to mostly shoveled ice. I had my dad’s F-150 backed down the driveway so I could throw some stuff in the bed without having to walk on said ice. As I was getting out of the truck, some guy walked up to me asking for some jumper cables. Apparently, he had a salt spreader on the back of his truck that was powered by a lawn mower engine, and the battery was dead. I thought he was just going to use his truck battery to jump the little motor, so I started inside to grab some furniture. Nope, the cables wouldn’t reach, and we needed to use my truck. No biggie, I thought, and tried to pull up the ever so slight hill in the driveway. This is where it started to suck.

I had counted on not being able to make it up the driveway, so I had thought about getting unstuck before I ever backed down. It was no surprise then, when I didn’t make it more than half way up the hill without sliding back down. Now I get to try my brilliant plan. I had been noticing, as I walked all over the driveway, that my boots stuck amazingly well to the hard packed snow. I never would have guessed that. Loose snow? Sure, OK, but packed stuff? My plan was to put snow in front of the tires and pack it down with the shovel if I couldn’t make it up the hill.

As I shoveled snow in front of and behind the tires, I was thinking about how cool it was that you could use snow to overcome the total lack of friction between ice and the tires. How is it then, that the snow sticks to the ice? It’s probably the same magic that makes Teflon stick to cooking pans. Anyway, I was going to then back up, throw some snow where the tires had been sitting, and away I would go with fans cheering and trumpets blaring. “I’m so cool,” I was thinking. I’m going to tell my dad, and it would become clear that, yes, I just might make a decent engineer, and that his money is being well spent on my education.

Since I went ahead and told you how cool I thought I was, you can probably tell where this is going. The packed snow thing actually worked really well. Kinda. It turns out that I can’t pack the snow enough by hitting it with the shovel. So, when I backed up, the truck was able to pack the snow enough to work as I had planned when I pulled forward. But when the tires hit the snow I put down, there was a hell of a rooster tail for a split second followed by nothing but wheel spin. After watching me pack snow for about ten minutes and trying again, the guy with the dead salt spreader calmly asked why I didn’t just start on the big gravel patch over there. Crap.

In my defense, that little patch of gravel, where my dad parks his car, was way off to the side of the driveway, and partially blocked from my sight by another car. Um, *cough*, yeah. It worked, and I was able to get enough speed before I hit the snice to power up the hill to the sound of one spinning tire. Not quite the sound track I had imagined earlier, but I was up the hill, darn it!

As I helped this guy get going, I couldn’t help but laughing at myself. I was feeling pretty cocky about last quarter and the universe stepped in to once again remind me how to spell humble. Plus, I got to look like a moron in front of a total stranger. On the plus side, redemption came with the stranger when the motor still wouldn’t start. When he pulled the plastic cover off to look over the motor, he found that it had a pull starter.

if you made it this far, i hope you weren't dissapointed

take it easy,
brian