#front end loader
This might surprise you, but I do volunteer at a local daycare. It’s part of my work-release program, negotiated by my shark of a lawyer, Max. Turns out that all the other criminals had been accused of some kind of crime that directly disqualified them from working with children, but “doing burnouts for seven straight minutes in front of the police station until the tires exploded” is not one of those. So I help out the kids, and part of that help is repairing toys.
As any parent knows, children are hard on toys. There’s a couple reasons for this. One, toys are built to be cheap, because children are hard on toys. Two, a child’s interest in a toy doesn’t last very long until they’ve outgrown it. Three, kids fucking misuse the damn things all the time. Just last week I saw a pair of little boys pushing a toy truck down the sidewalk while making a “vroom, vroom” sound that clearly had too many revolutions-per-minute to be a lazy-cammed, big-bore Chevy V8. What, did they swap that shit with a Busso?
Anyway, one morning, the daycare supervisor presented me with a broken front-end-loader. A wheel had broken off it, and was nowhere to be seen. This one, unlike others, was licensed. Someone at the toy company decided the best way to add verisimilitude to the tiny plastic construction equipment was to call up Caterpillar and give them some money in order to use their logo. Just to be an asshole about it, I decided to also call up Caterpillar and ask if I could get a service tech to come out and fix it.
Here’s the thing about Caterpillar: if you tell them that you have a service contract, and then kind of mumble a bunch of numbers into the phone when asked about it, they send someone out to fix it. The next morning, a full-ton Ram showed up, towing a flatbed trailer. On that flatbed trailer? One single two-inch plastic tire, ratchet strapped down for safety. That technician did a pretty good job, although he got a little shirty with me when I pointed out that he didn’t bother to use a torque wrench on the little fake lugnuts.
C’mon, man, there are kids watching. You gotta set a good example.
