
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