One of my least favorite responsibilities when I was managing a tow company was enforcing uniform compliance.  Drivers sometimes don't seem to care about their appearance, but they have very delicate sensibilities, so if you yell "tuck in your shirt" too loudly, they might cry.  You get all kinds of excuses when you start trying to make people look professional, but the looks you get are all the same: the same rolling-of-the-eyes they gave their mom for twenty years when she was trying to get them to look presentable.  A favorite response was, "I'm not on-duty."  My answer to that was always, if a customer can see you with your company uniform shirt untucked and unbuttoned, that is unacceptable, even if you're walking across the parking lot of your apartment complex to get on your motor scooter and ride to work.

Some drivers have a creative spirit, and they do care how they look, but part of that is looking different.  I don't necessarily like to promote that tendency, but it's not as offensive to me as slovenliness, so I sometimes let it go when I was managing.  I was kind of like that when I was a driver, so I can appreciate it.  In my early twenties, I often wore red Converse high-tops and olive drab fatigue pants while working, which were clear violations of the uniform policy.  At one point I had blonde stripes in my hair, which wasn't so much a violation of the uniform policy as it was a general irritation to management.  I tried getting around a hair-off-the-collar rule by wearing my hair in a ponytail at one point, but that didn't even look good, so I abandoned that.

At one point our uniforms changed so that we had blue epaulets on the shoulders of our white button-up shirts.  There was a lot of resistance to the epaulets, and I put up with it for awhile, in spite of being called "Cap'n" by the homeless guys who frequented the neighborhood I lived in.  I didn't like the epaulets, but I liked even less the thin, cheap fabric the shirts were made of, so I went to the uniform company and ordered my own shirts:  thicker fabric with a nicer feel to it, no epaulets, and no company name.  We did impounds primarily, so having the company name on the shirt sometimes caused me grief in public places.  I bought the shirts, so I didn't have to pay the uniform rental fees anymore, and I tried to lay low, but pretty soon the other guys started whining about my circumventing the established policies, but no one ever made me switch back.  I think various management personnel thought someone else had given me the thumbs-up, so no one ever called me on it.

Also, early on I decided that I didn't like the uniform pants we had, which had front pockets that looked very geeky and fit poorly.  I wanted some with the side-cut front pockets, so I just asked the uniform guy one day if there were options.  Why no one had thought to ever just ask if there were options is beyond me.  So then I got the better-looking, better-fitting side-cut pockets, and there was also a lot of whining about that until everybody figured out they could have them as well.

In warm weather, when you don't ever wear a jacket or coveralls, unless you have to, it's tough to keep a white uniform shirt clean.  I always kept a spare in my car, because unpredictable things can happen.  One time I covered a motorcycle accident, and the fuel tank had been knocked off the bike, and when I picked it up, it dumped its contents all over me.  Another time I was innocently napping on a couch in our office and one of my hapless coworkers decided to drop a can of Coke on me.  The worst, however, was a very hot August day when we were running old salvage cars out to a fire department traning facility, where they were using the cars for fire practice.  My boss was a Pontiac nut, and this one old Pontiac had some godawful big V-8 in it, which he extracted, and then he directed me to tow it out to the fire facility.  First, the front suspension on the car was messed up, so I tried towing it front the front, but then a mile or so down the road I figured out there was an issue with the rear axle of the Pontiac, so I put it on a dollie.  So I'm toodling up I-5, in an area with no emergency lane, and I hit a bump, and the torque converter fell out and got wedged under the dollie crossrails.  Now I'm laying under this Pontiac, with the dollies and a foor or two of the Pontiac and the tow truck in the right lane of traffic, early afternoon, about 195 degrees out, trying to knock this torque converter loose with a pry bar.  Torque converters in big old ugly Pontiacs are very heavy, and they retain transmission fluid, so when I finally got it loose and lifted it up to toss it in the car, the front of my uniform shirt was a combination of sweat and purple-black transmission fluid, almost matching the back, which was covered with highway dirt from lying on my back under the car.

When I got back to the office later, my boss said, "What happened to you?"

I smiled and said, "Torque converter."

"Oh yeah,” he said, “I should have pulled that out."

Brainiac.


Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper

www.towpartsnow.com

When you go to one of the Tow Shows, they usually have some kind of recovery display--a truck on its top, and a big rig pulls it back onto its wheels.  A good way to show off the equipment, but I can't imagine how violence does not somehow erupt.  You can be out in the woods somewhere, miles from nowhere, doing a recovery, and some yahoo will walk up and tell you what you're doing wrong.  THAT is the REAL miracle of the Tow Show recovery displays.  You've got hundreds of "experts" walking around, many of them with a beer in hand, you've got a major city street blocked off, and somehow a fistfight (or worse) does not break out in the middle of the gig.  You would think that everyone and their dog would be hollering out advice, telling the guy next to them how they did the same thing with a 2-ton snatch block, some twine, and a golf cart.

The most improbable recovery I was a part of was early in my towing career, at an urban impound company that had 2 pickup-bed sling trucks with Holmes 220 Electric units in the back.  Unfortunately, there were forested areas within the city and county limits, so occasionally we got some nasty recovery just a few miles from the urban center.  Usually we'd sent one of the medium-duty or heavy-duty wreckers up, but one day we got a Stolen Recovery that someone had driven out a spur road along some power lines and then pushed over the edge down about a hundred feet into the clearcut cleared for the power lines.  The spur road was too narrow and overgrown for the medium-duty, so my boss (my brother-in-law, at the time) and I headed up there with one of the Holmes 220s.

We had enough cable, but the incline was very steep, so that electric winch was having a lot of trouble pulling the half-ton pickup with oversize tires back up the hill.  My brother-in-law went down the hill and stayed with the truck, because one of the main problems we were having was with stumps.  They were all over the place, and tying the steering off wasn't working well.  We needed to maneuver the truck around and through the stumps.  So he would turn the steering wheel of the truck as needed while I ran the winch.  It was very slow going.  I'd have to rev the motor on the wrecker to get enough pulling power to move the pickup at all.

Finally, we got the pickup wedged between two stumps and my brother-in-law couldn't get the steering wheel to turn the way he wanted.  He pulled so hard on it that he broke the steering.  Now we were in real trouble.  No way to control the steering of the pickup as we winched it up the hill.  We called for a second truck.  There was a dual-winch Holmes 440 in the fleet, and we asked for that, but instead they sent the other 220.  My brother-in-law called the driver on the radio and asked him to bring a 6-pack.  It was a hot day, and we'd been up there about 2 hours already.  When the driver showed up with Pepsi, I thought my brother-in-law was going to punch him.

While we were waiting for the second truck, he had gone back down the hill and chopped most of one of the stumps out of the way with a Dollie Activator Bar.  Unbelievable.

We lined the two wreckers up side-by-side, ran both cables to the pickup, and alternately ran the winches.  The first truck was having real trouble, we had worked it so hard that when it died, the battery was dead, and we had to jump-start it with the other truck.  Both winches were smoking.  We would pull one truck, throttled up, until the front wheels came about 4 feet off the ground, then we'd pull with the other one till the first one went down and that one went up.  Then a police officer drove his cruiser down to see how we were doing and got stuck trying to back out.  We really didn't want to unhook either truck, so my brother-in-law asked if he could try getting it unstuck.  The officer was very reluctant, and I think he acquiesced simply to prove my brother-in-law couldn't get it out.  The road went down a ridge, so rather than trying to get turned around, my brother-in-law just gunned it downhill to get out of the muddy spot, and then took off down the road, which we had no idea where it went or what was down there.  The officer looked very concerned.  A few minutes later he came back up the road, fishtailing and throwing mud everywhere, right past us and up to the main road.  The officer started hiking up the muddy trail.

It was 6 hours from start to finish to get that pickup out and to the main road.   Other than the broken steering, it wasn't too much the worse for wear.  The wreckers looked a lot worse, mud everywhere, inside and out, cables and chains in disarray.  Those old V8 gas motors had worked extremely hard, and how those electric winches kept working through that much stress and extreme overuse is beyond me.  Later that night, at my sister and brother-in-law's house, we enjoyed the 6-pack of our choice.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

Municipal Contracts are a part of our business, let's face it.  Here in Portland we have a Towing Coordinator whose name is Marian Gaylord, and Marian has been running the show here for at least 20 years.  She has completely revamped the system, including ushering in a new Municipal Contract for City Towers that many think is the bane of their existence.  Hopefully they realize that it keeps unprofessional, fly-by-night outfits from qualifying for a spot on the tow rotation.

I recently went to a company meeting for one of our sister companies, and the subject of Marian Gaylord came up, because one of the Tow Company Managers deals directly with her on formal complaints she issues on behalf of the Agencies or citizens.  There was some discussion about why there were so many complaints, and what to do about them.  This Manager told the GM, his boss, "I'm not trying to be condescending, but you don't have a clue."

I thought, that's pretty good for not trying.

It was funny.  That's partly why I mention it.  But I also mention it because there are probably many of you out there who are frustrated at dealing with Municipal Agencies who "don't have a clue" about the towing industry and, whether they are trying to or not, are making your business life difficult.  At a company where I managed and dealt directly with Marian, we had 3 Municipal Contracts and also had a good market share of Private Property Impounds, which were also regulated to an extent.  When I received a formal complaint from Marian, I usually followed this procedure:
1. Investigate the complaint internally to get all of the facts.
2. Send back a written response within the given timeframe (we usually had a few weeks to respond, I think), either agreeing to the terms requested (usually payment of a fine or reimbursement to the vehicle owner), or requesting a different resolution.
3. Institute or revisit an internal procedure with our staff to attempt to prevent another similar complaint.

My written responses all had a very similar format.  In fact, they were basically form letters that I changed the particulars for each time.  I'm sure Marian caught onto this early on, but she never seemed bugged by it, and I think that was partly because the standard introduction and conclusion were overly polite.  In the introduction, I always included the statement, "We have reviewed this complaint and all applicable policies and procedures with our staff."  This told her we were taking it seriously, and you know what?  It was true.  We DID always review complaints and all applicable policies and procedures with our staff.  The intro also always included this statement, "Thank you for the opportunity to resolve this in an informal manner."  This showed Marian that we were actually grateful to get the complaint.  And it was also genuine and true.  A complaint letter and maybe payment of a small fine was better than a lawsuit, or interruption or cancellation of our Contract, and it was certainly a more informal resolution.

The middle of the letter included information that I felt was pertinent to the complaint, so that was the part I had to actually write every time.  I dealt only in facts, not in emotions or speculation.  I didn't write anything that I "thought" was true and claim it was true.  If it was a "he said/she said" situation, I would write that "the driver reports that..." or "the dispatcher reports that...."  I would leave it to Marian to interpret which account was most accurate.

The conclusion was either acceptance of the terms of the complaint or a request for a different resolution.  Acceptance was, "Enclosed is a check for $xx.xx for penalty payment.  We apologize for any inconvenience caused to the vehicle owner and/or the Agency, and we are taking steps to prevent this problem from recurring."  A request was simply asking for the penalty to be waived or reduced.  Her complaint letters always left that option open, and if she still felt a penalty was warranted, there would be a follow-up final resolution letter.

If I thought that the penalty or reimbursement was at all warranted, I almost always accepted the resolution, no questions asked.  You know what I found as a result?  If I did ask for a waiver or reduction, I almost always received it, or at least a partial reduction.

Then there was the most important part of the whole procedure, making sure we didn't screw up again.  We would go over the complaint with our staff--drivers, dispatchers, whoever was affected--and we would either figure out a new procedure to prevent the problem from happening again, or we would review the old procedure already in place that should have prevented the problem from happening in the first place.  Here's the deal: you can't prevent everything bad from happening.  Supposedly you have to tell a kid something 30 times before they completely understand it.  With an adult, it's probably twice that.  Why do you think they're called Drill Sergeants?  You have to drill things into your employees.  Don't fight it.  Just accept it, and do it.

If I saw Marian in person, I always tried to make her laugh--tell a joke or comment on something that I thought was funny.  I enjoyed working with her, and if I disagreed with her decisions, I was respectful.  In fact, I was somewhat mystified by some of the negative reports I heard from other tow companies about dealing with Marian.  Now, you might call all of this "buttering up" or "greasing the wheel."  Whatever.  I thought this was the most productive way to deal with a Municipal Agency, and I think the results bore that out.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

A customer called me recently, pricing out a Fork Holder.  Seems he had lost one.  He called back a short while later to tell me he found it… in the ditch.  Not sure if it fell off while he was driving, or if he was working a recovery, but he found it, after a short search.

My experience is things are lost only temporarily.  I have many stories of losing or misplacing something, only to have it return later. I don’t even worry now when I do lose something of value.  It always seems to find its way back to me.  

One year, while elk hunting, I leaned my rifle against the truck tire, and later backed up and drove away.  I had been parked at the end of an old spur road that you could barely drive on. Not more than two hours later, a family member called for me over the CB, to ask if I had my rifle.  Someone I knew had driven out this same spur road, found the rifle, recognized it, and then ran into one of my family members out on the main road.  Hunting seems to be one activity that lends itself to me losing stuff and later finding it. I’ve found lost gloves, knives, had a lost gun belt returned to me, and last year my daughter lost her tag, license, and Hunter Safety Card, and we found them the next day on a trail we’d followed that day.

Years ago, before cell phones, tow truck drivers carried message pagers, and before that, beepers.  One late night I was sent up into the Forest Park west of Portland to meet a County Sheriff, who had found a stolen vehicle. He walked me out an old blocked-off road to this car, which was complete, but there was no way to drive to the vehicle.  The Sheriff has this idea that I could winch it downhill through the forest to the main road, which was about 500  yards. I had 150 feet of cable on my truck. He made me unspool it to prove I couldn’t do it, so I free-spooled through trees in the dark until it was all the way out, which was really silly because he just left me there and told me it was my problem.  I needed to make sure the car was impounded.

After I re-wound my cable, I left the scene, figuring we’d come back the next day with cable extensions and a
chainsaw.  I was halfway back to the shop when I realized I didn’t have my (bleeping) beeper. The forests here in Western Oregon tend to be thick, with a lot of underbrush.  At least it wasn’t raining.  I drove back up there, and fortunately I had the assistance of sound. I had the dispatcher set off the beeper until I found it.  I hadn’t particularly enjoyed being out in the dark forest the first time.  This time it was even creepier, with the faint sound of beeping getting slowly louder.  After about ten minutes I found it in the dead leaves.

My family gets irritated with me at home when there is a search for a misplaced item, because I confidently join the search, repeating the mantra, “I easily and effortlessly find the (lost item).” The idea is that if you walk around saying, “I can’t find my keys,” then your subconscious makes sure you’re right. I’m not saying my technique works best. I’m just saying I almost always find whatever we’re looking for first.  And I’m not unusually perceptive.  I think that’s what really bugs them about it.

So try it, if you’re ever in a ditch looking for a Fork Holder, or something like that.

Have a safe and profitable week.
 Sincerely,
Nick Kemper


www.TowPartsNow.com

Impounding a large, American-made beater that had been ticketed for removal late one night, on a dark street in a bad neighborhood, I back up my Eagle to the rear of the car, and when the Claws touch the rear tires, the car immediately begins to roll away down the block.  The road is sloped gently, but
enough that I can't safely attempt to follow the escaping car with the truck and slide the claws in place to make a moving pick-up, which can be done if you keep your wits about you.  I feel I need to do SOMETHING, so I get out and started running after it.  The driver's door window is down or broken out, so I run alongside and grab the steering wheel.  Locked.  Some of you old-school guys might know this--you can move a locked steering wheel on older cars by hitting it in the right place while applying pressure one way or the other.  I frantically begin beating on the steering wheel, to turn it slightly to the right.  Keep in mind: it’s almost Midnight, I’m in a baaaaad neightborhood, running as fast as  I can, punching something through an open car window – it’s a miracle I didn’t draw sniper fire.  There is a space between parked cars on the other side of the street, and I’m aiming for it.  I manage to hit it.  The car hops the curb and stops on the  sidewalk.  I collect my thoughts, wait for my pulse to drop below 200 beats per minute, and complete the tow.

A common mistake I've made a few times over the years is forgetting to shift the truck's transmission in park during the hookup.  On
one occasion, I was impounding an older front-wheel drive car for the local county sheriff from the parking lot of a housing project.  It
was nosed into the parking space in park, so I backed up to the rear of the car, slid the Eagle Claws in place, lifted the vehicle, and strapped it down.  Then I began to assemble the tow dollie under the front wheels.  I activated the dollie on one side of the car.  I then activated the dollie on the other side of the car, and to my amazement, it started rolling away.  I had left the truck in reverse, but the towed vehicle's front wheels on the ground were enough to keep the whole thing stationary.  Freed from their position with the activation of the dollie, those wheels weren't much help anymore.  The dollie wheels climbed the curb and started over the sidewalk.  I was on the wrong side of the truck to attempt to get to the cab and put the truck in park, or apply the brake.  I grabbed the dollie release handles and
 deactivated the dollie.  There was some gouging of the grass on the other side of the sidewalk by the dollie frames, but the truck and the car stopped.  I smiled sheepishly at the sheriff's deputy, who gave me a puzzled look but didn't say anything.

I had a great career driving tow truck, with very few accidents/incidents that resulted in monetary loss for my employer.  I hired drivers in my management time who did more damage in 90 days than I did in 15+ years.  However, I had a LOT of close calls, often the result of my own inattention or overconfidence.  Towing is an inexact science.  There are a lot of variables.  Kind of like life.  And business.  How
you react to a situation of distress often defines your effectiveness.  Something tells me that, in 5 or 10 or 20 years' time, when we look back at this current time of economic distress, we will ask ourselves, how did we react?  Did we let the runaway car go off the cliff, or did we slow the moment down and locate our damage-control techniques? Could be the difference-maker.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com


 

The other night I actually dreamt that I was helping another driver move a big old Cadillac inside a garage on dollies.We had very little room to maneuver, and for some reason all we were trying to do was move it from one side of the garage to the other.  I don't know what the "meaning" was other than to decrease the quality of my sleep and to wake up thinking that I just did a whole bunch of work I'll never get paid for. It made me think about some of the "challenging" dollie jobs I did over the years.

One fun one was an impound of an abandoned mid-80s Oldsmobile from a low-income housing project. It was parked nose-in, between 2 other cars.  I picked it up from the rear, and oddly, it rolled a little with the front wheels on the ground.  This didn't make a whole lot of sense, because it was a front-wheel drive with an automatic transmission, but since there wasn't much room between the parked cars, I decided to take advantage of this strangeness by rolling forward a few feet before setting up the dollie.  I figured maybe the lock-pin in the tranny was broke, or the linkage was disconnected.

Rule 1: If something odd happens, take a moment to try to figure out why.

As I rolled forward, both front tires of this Olds flopped outward.  It looked like a special-effect from a Herbie movie.  They just flopped out, and the front of the car sat right on the ground.  NOW I got out and walked back to see what had happened.  There was no engine, no transmission, no front suspension, no radiator.  The only things under the hood of this car were the horn and the 2 shock absorbers still attached to the wheels.  Somehow someone had gotten this thing to stand up on its front wheels with only the shocks attached to the car body. And then I came along and disturbed the precarious balance and, well, let's just say my language got colorful at that point.

First I tried dragging it, but the flopped-out tires were pretty much touching the cars on either side, so that proved to be a bad idea.  With those 80s uni-body designs, there wasn't even really a lifting point you could get to with a floorjack anywhere near the front of the car.  I ended up tilting up the rear high enough to get jackstands under the lifting points behind the front wheels, and then I teetered the car on the jackstands (safety experts do NOT recommend doing this, so I can't endorse this tactic, although I did it about 200 times over the years and the car fell on people only a handful of times, and a couple of times on pets).  This allowed me to set up the dollies under the "free" wheels in the front.  And when I say "free," I mean FREE, because there wasn't anything to hold these wheels upright or straight once the weight of the vehicle was on them.  It was like getting a piggyback ride on a marionette with no one holding the strings.  I positioned the wheels slightly splayed outward, so that they kind of got pinned up in the fender well against the point where the shocks attached to the body, which still was not stable by any  stretch of the imagination.  Then I slowly lifted the car off the jackstands.  I extracted the vehicle from its parking space by retracting the wheellift, then easing the truck forward while simultaneously extending the wheellift, which kept the Olds stationary (term used loosely), then retracting the wheellift some more, until I was out away from the other parked cars.  The car was wobbling in the dollie like Lee Marvin drunk on the horse in "Cat Ballou" (there's an ancient movie reference for you), and there was nothing to keep the dollie from wandering whichever direction, so in the 45 minutes or so I
worked on this, vehicles were coming perilously close to each other at frequent and unpredictable intervals.

Then when I got it out, and the whole thing collapsed upon itself, I got to have some MORE fun trying to figure out how to hook up to the front of the vehicle with the wheellift.  There was nowhere to place a frame fork short of just under the front seat, and then it would have had to puncture the sheet metal around the "frame" to settle into the fork.  I lifted up under the  bumper and set my jackstands back in place (miraculously remembering to block the rear wheels), and repeated the process of balancing the tires, this time in the wheellift.  Again I angled the tires slightly to create a "nestling" effect, and then I tightened the wheellift straps with great force.  I chained the base of the shocks to the wheellift. I knew it wasn't going to fall off, but there was a whole-lotta-swayin' goin' on in the wheellift as I drove to the
impound lot.

2 hours of extra work due to a "shortcut."

Have a safe and profitable week.
Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com


  

Fall is the good time-change, the one-hour “Fall Back,” which means we all get to sleep an extra hour that weekend. The time-changes are tricky when you're calculating work hours for employees.  Please, those of you who calculate work hours by hand, if you have graveyard shift employees, and the Spring Forward has just occurred, there was an hour early Sunday morning that didn't happen, so don't pay them for it.  Similarly, in the Fall, you have an extra hour to pay them for on another Sunday morning. Believe it or not, I’ve worked a few of these graveyard shifts myself.

One year, in the Fall, I was working a swing shift that ended at 2 a.m.  So the problem was, on this particular Saturday evening, when 2 a.m. hit, it switched to 1 a.m.  So, in effect, my 12-hour shift became a 13-hour shift.  What was kind of funny about it is that I impounded a car at around 1:45 a.m., and then I got another impound soon afterward, and I brought that car in at 1:30 a.m.  So I finished a later tow at an earlier time.  Looked kind of strange on the tow log.

Another year, the Spring time-change.  I was managing a 24-hour dispatch center, and we had a relatively new Dispatcher working alone on Saturday swing shift, and our business was growing so that every Saturday night seemed a little busier.  I volunteered to come in and help during the busy time, about 5-10 pm.  Two of my other dispatchers had gone on vacation to Disneyland.  Don't ask me why I let them both take time off at the same time, and don’t ask me why two young males went to Disneyland together.  They were due in that day, and one of them was scheduled to work the graveyard shift that night.  Shortly after I arrived at 5 p.m., he called in and claimed that he couldn't work.  They had been driving all day, and he was "so tired he was throwing up."  So my 5-hour unpaid shift (I was a manager, so I was on salary) turned into a 12-hour unpaid overnight shift.  Without the time-change, it would have been a 13-hour shift--at least I had that going for me.  The swing shift Dispatcher had to be in at 2 p.m. the next day, so I let him go home around 11.  I confess that I laid my head down on the desk and slept for about an hour at one point.  8 a.m. came--no day shift Dispatcher.  She had forgotten to change her clock, so she sauntered in at 8:59, all smiles, with a "what are you doing here?"  I calmly gave her the story of the lame coworker who couldn't work after his week-long vacation.  She was "disgusted" at his behavior. As I got up to leave, I told her, "Oh, by the way, it's 9 o'clock.  The time changed last night."  She went white as a sheet.  Made me smile.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick
Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

Although I worked in the impound industry for many years, I did not do a lot of repos, but enough to have some good stories.  The first repo I ever did was for a small credit agency, on an early 70's model Chevy Nova.  The credit agency rep wanted to ride along, and one of the drivers who worked with me also wanted to ride along, so we all piled into a Ford Diesel (not ideal for repos) with an Eagle Claw and headed out.

The car was parked at a motel.  Seemed strange to me that the rep knew it was at a motel.  Turns out the vehicle owner was a lady-of-the-evening, and she was working.  I didn't feel particularly nervous, but the credit agency rep apparently was, because he starting breathing rapidly and heavily, almost to the point of hyperventilation.
  The angle to the back of the car was tough, so I didn't quite get the Eagle Claws set before lifting, and it slid off.  Then I got nervous.  I dropped it twice more before getting the claws set right.  The gas tank got kind of messed up.  But we got the car, and the agency rep was happy.

Many years later, the company I was working for got a repo contract for another small credit agency.  For these cars, we had owner info, but no one to find the vehicle for us, so it was a hunt-and-tow set-up.  One of the addresses, for a Dodge mini-van, was out in a rural area, so I waited until late (around midnight) and drove out to check it out.  The address was a mobile home in a very rural area.  No lights anywhere, except for a large floodlight on the front of the mobile home.  There were cars everywhere--on the lawn, in the driveway, behind the mobile home--about 15 total, but no Dodge mini-vans.  I was about to leave, and then I saw, out in the field behind the mobile home, the outline of the rear of a mini-van.  It looked like the right vehicle, but it was well off the road, on the other side of the mobile home.  There wasn't even a driveway out to where it was.  I sat there for several minutes and thought about it.  There was no easy access to the front of the van, which was a front-wheel drive, and that made it even more risky.  Finally I decided it wasn't worth the risk, and I drove back to the shop.

One of the other drivers asked me about it, and I gave him the scoop.  He told me he was going to go try to get the mini-van.  I told him he was nuts, and I went home.  The next day I came into work, and there was the mini-van.  He had driven out to the house, turned off his lights, backed ACROSS the front lawn, into the field, slid the wheellift through the tall grass under the bumper of the van, threw his safety chains around the rear axle and into the chain slots on the crossbar, lifted it up on the chains, and drug it back across the lawn, IN PARK.  The grass was slick, so the wheels just slid without tearing up the sod.  He got it out on the road, dropped it, turned around and grabbed it from the front, and got out of there.  He told me that while he was throwing the safety chains around the rear axle, the one thought in his head was, "When is the gunshot coming?"

Another driver I worked with did a similar repo in a rural area late at night.  He had an address, and he mapped it out in his Thomas Guide (days before GPS navigation).  He drove for miles on a rural road, and then it turned into gravel.  He drove farther, and then there was a gate.  He drove farther, and then there was a mobile home, with the K-5 Chevy Blazer with oversized tires he was supposed to repo, parked within a few feet of the trailer.  He snagged it from behind with his Eagle Claw, strapped it, and took off.  He told me later, "I was in such a hurry I didn't lift the claws high enough, so when I went through a dip it exploded the ratchet when it hit the ground."  Exploded the ratchet.  It would have exploded my HEART.   Who keeps going on a rural gravel road THROUGH A GATE?!?

Probably what the vehicle owner was thinking as he slept peacefully through it all in his mobile home.


Have a safe and
profitable week,

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com 

My daughter is learning to drive, and she’s doing fine with it, but it makes me remember some of MY escapades at that age.  Yikes!  It also reminds me of some accidents I covered, unfortunately. 

On one late evening, I was dispatched to W. Burnside Rd. in Portland, near the Washington Park Zoo, to recover an older Honda that was on its top about 50 yards off the road.  This was a wooded area, and the road went up a steep incline, but it was highly-traveled and narrow, so there were a lot of accidents on this road.  When I got to the scene, I tried to find where the vehicle went off the road, because it's often easiest to bring a car up the way it went down, but I couldn't, so I found the simplest route back to road, rolled the vehicle over, and pulled it up.

The next day, the vehicle's driver, 18 years old, and his mother arrived at the storage lot to view the vehicle and get some personal items.  He was pretty banged up, but okay, and I learned that there had been 5 teenagers in this little late 70s Civic, and that they were all okay, which was pretty amazing considering that there wasn’t a single piece of glass left in this car.  They couldn’t find his wallet.  I told them I would revisit the accident scene later that day and take a look for it, and give them a call if I found it.

That afternoon, I drove up to the scene and started looking for the wallet.  I couldn't find it, and I couldn't help noticing that there wasn't very much glass in the foliage and on the ground where the vehicle had lain on its top.  Also, I still couldn't see where the car had come off the road, which was strange.  As I looked around, I noticed some glass on a marked trail on the hillside above me, opposite the road, about 25 yards up the hill.  I hiked up to the spot, and sure enough, there was a pile of glass on the trail.  It was a wide trail, part of the Forest Park trail system, and I thought maybe they had been messing around, trying to drive this little car on the trail, and rolled off and down hill, but that didn't explain how the glass had gotten on the trail . Then I looked farther up the hill, and I saw the trail of crushed ferns and damaged brush.  I followed it uphill, passing a homeless person's tent about 5 feet from where the vehicle went, up about 500 yards, before I came to one of the Forest Park Roads.  There I found a long set of skid marks leading to the road corner.  I turned and looked down the hill to see how far this little car had flown into the air and rolled over-and-over down this steep, wooded incline, until it came to rest at the bottom of the gulch alongside the much busier Burnside Rd.

5 teenagers, and they all walked away.  I never found the wallet.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

In the impound tow world, we sometimes experience gatecrashers, vehicle owners who like to redeem their vehicle from the impound lot by force.  A common practice is to ram the gate full-force with a vehicle to knock it down.  You can do a lot of things to prevent this activity, or to prevent it from working.

At one of our impound lots, a vehicle owner did this successfully in the wee hours of the morning, but he was especially clever.  He hotwired a car to crash the gate, and then he drove his own vehicle out.  That prevented him from damaging his own car.  The next day we called the fence company out to fix the gate, which was damaged but didn't have to be replaced.

Well, apparently that 100-yard trip across the lot and through the gate in the hotwired car had impressed this guy with the performance of the car, because he came back the next night and crashed the gate AGAIN with this car, only this time he kept the car.  You have to appreciate the combination of skill, guts, and persistence this particular gatecrasher had.  My boss was in a tizzy, of course, but to us drivers, it was kind of amusing.

The story doesn't end there, of course.  Two nights later, I was sent out to impound a car from someone's driveway in the neighborhood of our impound lot.  It was a little strange, but someone had simply left their car in a graveled side driveway next to someone's house, clearly off the road and on private property.  The homeowner called the police first to make sure it wasn't stolen, and he was advised to have it towed away.

In the 20 minutes between the homeowner's call and my arrival, a DIFFERENT vehicle, being chased by the police, crashed into this first vehicle.  The driver t-boned this illegally parked car, pinning it against the homeowner's fence, bailed out and ran, and when I got there, the police were scouring the neighborhood for him.

I had to wait until they authorized me to move the escape vehicle away from the vehicle I was supposed to tow.  I wrote up an incident report while I was waiting, and another tow company showed up on a police rotation tow to impound the escape vehicle.  Then I completed my tow and went on my way.

The next day my boss was reading my incident report, and he recognized the vehicle description and license plate number of the escape vehicle as THE CAR THAT CRASHED OUR GATE TWICE.  This guy really got around, and this little Corolla he liked was very durable.  I hadn't recognized it, because there were several hundred cars in the impound lot, and I had never known for sure which one was creating all the havoc.  I don't think they ever caught the guy.  My boss called the other tow company and talked them into letting us get the car from them.  We blocked it in with two other vehicles, and no one ever claimed it.

Imagine the story from the gatecrasher's end.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com