. Jobs are sometimes like boats - the two happiest days are the day you get it, and the day you get rid of it. For this person who decided to move on, someone I've worked closely with for 5 years now, it was a happy day. Will we be able to replace him? Yes. It won't be exactly the same. Each individual brings different strengths, skills, and work habits to a company, so when a key person leaves, it changes how the company operates.

I remember when I left my management job, I wondered how the company would survive without me. It seemed to me that I was keeping the boat afloat. Of course, when I left, things went right on like they always had. In a way, that was a testament to my results, because I had developed, trained, and nurtured a lower management staff precisely to do just that - take over when I left. Five years later, the company is still prospering, and I expect they will for a long time. Even though I was a key person, I was just one out of a team of 50+, so unless I had my finger in the dyke, it wasn't going to be doomsday when I left.

Employee turnover continues to be a major concern in the towing industry. One thing I did before I left that management job was to call in a staffing agency to assess our operation and to see if they could help us. The agency rep was quite candid when she pointed out that she couldn't provide a single qualified candidate for the open driver positions we had, based on the average wage of our drivers. We just weren't paying enough to get and keep good people. Because our drivers were on commission, the experienced, motivated drivers could do quite well, but the entry-level drivers struggled and inevitably left for the afore-mentioned greener pasture. Developing the skills to become a high-producing commission driver was a difficult proposition for us as a company - if the driver didn't do well within a few months of being hired, he would start looking elsewhere. And if he could take a $10/hour job and do better, who could blame him? So we often just hoped we would find the driver who already had what it took to be a high producer.

Employee turnover was probably my number-one headache when I was managing that tow company. I don't think I ever learned to accept it. And maybe that's what would have helped more than anything else. I've heard the analogy of the axe that was kept by its owner for 25 years and used every day. After 25 years, it was on its fifth handle and third head, but it was still the same axe. That's a pretty good analogy for a tow company. Don't keep swinging an axe with a broken handle or a dull head, or both. Replace and retool when necessary.

I used to be a fan of the TV show "The Apprentice." In fact, I dreamed of firing one employee every week. I thought I could make it one per month, just to make it more workable. Think about how much that would raise the level of performance for the employees in the lower half of the scale. If, no matter what, one employee were fired each month, most people would do almost anything to not be that person. I think it would really expose the potential of many workers who seem to guard that very closely.

I've been hearing the same statement for years: So many people are out there looking for work when there are plenty of jobs available. Maybe people are too picky, or maybe they are not looking in the right place. Every job I've ever had - and I mean EVERY job, except for two hours when I washed dishes in a restaurant in Caldwell, Idaho - I got through someone I knew. Family member, family friend, former colleague. I've tried to find work through classifieds, Monster.com, whatever, but like many things in business, nothing beats the efficiency of networking. I think that job-hunters sometimes bypass this simplest and most effective of approaches. Conversely, some of the best recruiting I've ever done was via networking, asking friends and employees and colleagues to recommend someone they knew. There are a lot of reasons for this working so well, not the least of which is trust. When you interview someone you don't know, and you don't even know anyone they know, there are a lot of things you will not find out until later down the road when circumstances bring them to the surface. I often called the manager of top competitor to ask for an unofficial reference on an applicant, and he did the same with me, because tow truck drivers seem to cycle in and out of many different companies in a single market. I encourage those of you who do the hiring to do the same. And be honest when someone asks you for a reference. You don't want to contribute to any surprises. What comes around, goes around, you know.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper

www.TowPartsNow.com

Thinking today about mishaps.  Back in the eighties, the company I worked for had 3 Vulcan Super Cradles and 1 of the new Vulcan Scoop Wheellifts.  It was a joy to drive that Scoop truck, especially after hooking up cars on a Super Cradle.  One of the novelties at the time was the idea of the "strapless" wheellift, which is how the Scoops work, of course.  There was a lot of skepticism on the crew, and especially at rival companies.  My good friend Len, who was usually assigned to that truck, was fond of claiming that you could NOT lose a car out of that wheellift, even with no straps.  This was in the days before safety chains were fashionable.  Of course, if you go around making claims like that, the gods are going to make you the butt of a joke.  One evening Len took an exit off I5 south of Portland, pulled up to the light at the top of the exit, saw no traffic, and made a quick right turn.  When he did, the car jumped out of the scoops and rolled down into the bushes between the exit ramp and the freeway.  Fortunately no more harm that tracks through the landscaping occurred.  The car stopped before rolling into the freeway.  Len stopped, composed himself, cleaned up any mess that had taken place in the cab, and winched the car back up to the exit ramp.  He didn't talk as much smack about the "strapless" wheellift after that.

Another driver I worked with at the same company pulled into one of our service stations one afternoon with a customer vehicle on the hook and took a rather circuitous route through the parking lot and began to unhook the car in a remote corner of the station property.  This guy was normally a very jovial and talkative guy.  Usually he would arrive at a destination and, if he hadn't talked to someone in 10 minutes or so, he'd get out and gab for a half-hour before someone told him to get back to work.  This day he immediately began hurriedly unhooking the car.  The station manager thought maybe something was up, so we wandered over and casually inspected the vehicle.  On the passenger-side of the tow truck and the towed vehicle, there was dirt and vegetation, even some berry vines hanging.  There was also a huge dent in the trunk lid of the towed vehicle.  When questioned, the driver nervously blurted out the "it was like that when I got there" excuse.  After about eight seconds of intense interrogation, he caved and admitted the truth.  He had been in-tow, paying little attention to the traffic ahead, which was at a stop.  When he noticed this, it was too late to stop, so he veered into the ditch, where the push bumper of the tow truck struck a traffic sign of some sort, which flew up into the air and came down on the trunk lid of the towed vehicle.  He managed to get back onto the road, having cleared some of the brush out of the ditch.

In the "one that almost got away" category, my brother-in-law was asked to train a new driver how to run a sling truck.  This was back in the seventies.  The trainee was adamant that he already knew how, had been running a sling for years.  After some discussion, my brother-in-law gave up and headed out on his first call.  The new driver was given his own call soon afterward.  He completed the tow, a full-size van, and was sent on another.  After he was on this call for awhile, he radioed my brother-in-law to ask for some help.  When my brother-in-law arrived, the new driver said, "When I put the sling under the car and lift up, it just slides off."  My brother-in-law gave him a funny look and asked him if he'd tried using the j-hooks and chains WITH the sling.  He hadn't.  So the training that was supposed to have happened earlier that morning began at that point.  After the new driver had properly hooked up the vehicle, my brother-in-law remembered that the new driver had ALREADY TOWED A VEHICLE.  He asked the new driver how the other vehicle had stayed on the sling.  The full-size van had a trailer hitch, which caught on the lower bar of the sling and stayed on there for the duration of the tow.  Yikes!

Another Tow Sling disaster happened to a coworker of mine who was driving a light-duty wheellift with a tow sling.  For the first call of the day, he was dispatched to tow a brand-new BMW.  When he got to the car, he lowered the wheellift and slickly backed up to the front of the vehicle, coming to a quick stop as the wheellift closed to within inches of the BMW's tires.  Problem was, he had forgotten to secure the tow sling properly, which was flopped up to stay out of the way, and with the quick stop it flopped DOWN, right on the hood of the BMW.  We named the maneuver the McCain Technique, after the driver who inadvertently introduced it.

Unfortunately, for insurance companies everywhere, I could go on with these stories for days.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

Going through my old journals the other day, from when I was a driver, I found a page-long gripe about fleet maintenance.  Hopefully I'm not going to alienate too many shop managers out there, but it struck me funny to read it, so I'm going to include some of it here:

"Every day I fill out a pre-trip checklist, on which I list problems or repairs needed, like, 'RDS brake locks at crucial moments--please install drag chute.'  My boss looks at the list every day and tosses it, sometimes saying to me, 'You don't have to write the same thing every day.  Just write a problem down once, and it'll get taken care of eventually.'  Right.  And monkeys might (you know what).  Now I just write, 'Please refer to 3-17, 3-21, 3-22, 3-23, 3-25, 3-30, and 4-1 lists for previously listed problems.'  Each one of those lists has at least one new repair needed, including the locking brake and other insignificant trifles like inexplicable loss of power and random pulling to the left or right while braking and the SERVICE ENGINE SOON light coming on and coolant and oil and power steering fluid leaks."  I think I was irritated when I wrote that.

I never engaged in truck repairs unless I had to.  The companies I worked for usually didn't want the drivers doing too much, because most of us knew only enough to break something worse.  I remember once when my boss hired a "Security Officer" to spy on the employees, and it was someone I knew, who immediately blew his cover by frightening me near to death on a late spooky night because he thought it would be funny.  Afterwards he thought the Ford Diesel I was driving "didn't sound right," so he started messing with the fuel/water mixture control or some such thing, and then it REALLY didn't sound right.  I had to explain to my boss that I let the yo-yo he hired to spy on us do an in-lot repair, which didn't go over well.  For either of us.

After I got into management, I became a little more self-sufficient, once even changing a broken PTO belt myself on a weekend.  There are times when the back-up truck is so frightening that you'll go to great lengths to get your regular truck back on the road.  Another time I got a screw in a front tire of my truck, and I was able to slow down the leak by screwing it in all the way.  I returned to the lot and was bemoaning the development to our graveyard-shift dispatcher, who also happened to be a supreme computer geek, designing websites, creating a lien package program out of market software, and developing a complete DOS-based dispatching/accounting/auction software program for our company (better than any market program I've seen since).  He said, "I can show you how to plug the tire."  Trust me, this seemed suspicious.  The guy had an extra long fingernail on each pinky, so you wouldn't think he could plug a tire.  Turns out he had watched one of the graveyard-shift drivers do it a few times, so we found the fixins in the mechanic's cage and he talked me through it.  Employees who pay attention are priceless.

The best tow truck mechanics, in my experience, are the ones who get emotional and start throwing heavy sharp things when things aren't going their way, and when you get your truck back from them, you get a 3-part seminar on where to look for weld cracks on your dollie frames and crossrails.  Admirable to try to teach preventive maintenance to the commission drivers, who are then going to run the equipment into the ground and whine non-stop while the truck is down.

Takes all types.  Makes life richer.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

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

One of my former drivers called me a few weeks ago to tell me he was moving, and he asked me to write a letter-of-reference for him, which I did happily.  I was his supervisor for 5 years, and he was one of these guys who always stepped up when something extra needed to be done, always working extra shifts, running on-call from home, coming in early, staying late.  If we’re lucky, we all have drivers like this.  It's easy to take these people for granted, especially once we get used to them doing this for us.  We have to remember to say Thank You once in awhile, and usually that recognition means as much, if not more, than the extra money they earn by working extra.

It reminded me of one of this driver's quirks, and if he's reading this, hopefully he can laugh along with us as I tell you about it.  One of his pet phrases was, "It's a Catch-20."  Now, most of us know that the correct phrase is "Catch-22," from the Joseph Heller novel about a WWII fighter pilot who tries to get out of the service by claiming he's crazy, but the military reasons that no sane person would want to stay in the military flying missions, so because he wants out, he's not crazy.  So he can't win either way, which is what we now call a "Catch-22."  But this driver always said "Catch-20," and it was a point of humor for those of us who worked with him.  I'm sure someone corrected him at some point, but he kept saying "Catch-20."

At some point during my management time I heard that if you want to change or establish a habit, you have to do some new behavior for 21 days.  I don't know if it's true, but it made sense to me, and I was having trouble helping my drivers establish new habits, or changing old ones, so I decided to try the 21-day program.  The way it worked was this: say your drivers were having trouble remembering to lock and secure impounded vehicles in the storage lot.  I would go out every morning and check all the vehicles.  If anything was unlocked or unsecured, I would make a note of which driver towed it in, ask around to make sure that no one else opened it up to move it after it was towed in, and then I would give the driver an assignment.  For the next 21 work days, he or she would be responsible for checking ALL of the vehicles in the storage lot at some point during their shift, and if they found anything unlocked or unsecured, they would lock and secure the vehicle, and report it to me.

This way, I had other people checking the vehicles besides me, and reporting the problems, and most important, locking and securing the vehicles.  If the driver failed to do this successfully during their 21-day sentence, the sequence would RE-START.  If I found a vehicle unlocked or unsecured, and someone was in the middle of their 21-day sentence, and I could determine that the vehicle was in the lot for their entire previous shift, then the driver who towed the car in would start a 21-day sentence, PLUS the driver who was in the middle of their sentence would get to start over.

This became almost comical (for me), as I had multiple drivers out checking cars at all times of the day and night, and some of them went on and on for weeks on end, because they couldn't put together 21 work days in a row.  The look on a driver's face when I told him his 21 days was starting over, as he suddenly remembered what he forgot to do the day before, was p-r-i-c-e-l-e-s-s.

You could do it for other things to, like pre-trip inspections, for instance.  If they didn't do their pre-trip inspection one day, then they would be assigned to pre-trip at least one additional truck other than their own for the next 21 work days.  Then you'd have drivers checking trucks that they didn't normally check, which of course would turn up maintenance issues that the assigned drivers weren't reporting because they weren't really doing their own pre-trips thoroughly or properly.  Then they'd start on their own 21-day cycle.

It was all so much fun.  I don't know if it worked, but it was one of those things that the veteran drivers would tell the new drivers about during their training, as if they were recounting tortures in a Turkish prison, thereby striking fear in the hearts of the newbies as they started to wonder about what this nice guy who hired them was really all about if he could come up with something so cruel and relentless.  As a manager, you KNOW something has value if it can do THAT.

When I first laid out the program at an Employee Meeting, I explained how it would work, which produced many groans and threats of legal action, then I told them, "We're calling it the Catch-21 Program."  This was extremely funny to a handful of employees who knew about the Catch-20/Catch-22 discrepancy, and they had great difficulty silencing their laughter.  Mr. Catch-20, who was listening intently, because he was someone who was very meticulous about his work and didn't much like people getting away with not being meticulous, said, "That's a great idea!"

I smiled. "I knew you'd like it," I told him.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

http://www.facebook.com/#!/towpartsnow

At a customer's facility today, looking at a wrecked tow truck, and a gaze at the truck's interior reminded me of why I got out of managing tow truck drivers.  You would think that if you spend 8-18 hours a day in your workspace, you would want that workspace to look, feel, and smell as good as possible.  Some drivers take great pride in their assigned truck, keeping the outside and inside clean and professional-looking.  Some drivers... don't.  A good way to know how someone is going to take care of your equipment is to take a look at their personal vehicle.  Doing that sometimes made me cry.

At one point in my managing days, I resorted to monthly truck inspections.  At first, I scheduled them and told the driver when I was going to do the inspection.  This worked most of the time.  For at least one day every month, that truck was in good shape.  After several months, I made the inspections surprise inspections.  Wow, you've never heard such grumbling.  Inspection scores were figured into performance evaluations, so they were sensitive to this new concept of work performance actually having a direct effect on their compensation.  Crazy idea, I know.

 There was a good deal of competition between drivers to see who could get the highest score, or even a perfect score.  I think I only gave out one perfect score during the program, which lasted a year or so.  It was hard to sustain, doing 14 surprise inspections per month, especially in winter. 

My goal with tow truck cleanliness was not a perfect score on a surprise inspection, but just a general professional look and smell, and a tidiness, every day.  If you wouldn't want your mom to get in that truck, then that was a problem, because a lot of customers are someone's mom.  I don’t need to do the white-glove test.  I don’t need to feel Armor-All on the seat.  Those hard-to-reach spots between the bed and the cab don’t need to be polished, but every once in awhile you have to finish off an old wash mitt by reaching in there to wipe away the outer layer of grime.

 You have to appreciate the scars and marks that accumulate on a piece of equipment that’s been in circulation a long time.  I’m not talking about broken windshields or crushed fenders, but there really shouldn’t be new paint on your wheellift.  The bed and butt-plate should have a few scratches.  What you want are trucks that work, in more than one sense of the word.  And a truck like that deserves respect.  It can get dirty, muddy, whatever.  But when the day is done, it needs a little love.

 One of the tricky parts of getting your drivers to take care of their equipment is the simple dichotomy that applies to all aspects of your business.  They don’t own the truck. You do.  They don’t own the office space they’re working in, or the dollar passing through their hands from your customer to you.  If they don’t own it, they won’t care as much about it as you do.  Plain and simple.  The best thing you can do, the only thing you can do… is to put it in their interest.  What’s the definition of “put it in their interest?”  Could be a lot of things:  incentives, intimidation, freedom.  That’s your job:  to figure out what interests each one of your employees.  That’s one reason why no one said it would be easy.  And accept that your employee will not care as much as your truck, your money, your business as you do.  Why should they?

I have had many Dollie Adventure in my time behind the wheel of a tow truck.  On one Sunday, I was sent out to impound an old Datsun 510, and when I got there I found that it had no wheels.  Other than it being an annoyance, it wasn’t  a terribly big deal, because I had towed many vehicles without wheels with a wrecker and dollies by that point in my career. Usually I would strap or chain the vehicle to the dollie, but it was a Sunday afternoon, so the traffic was light, and I was being lazy, so I centered  the Datsun on the dollie and headed for the impound lot (securing the vehicle  to the dollie prevents the load from moving in the dollie, which can happen with steel wheels on steel dollie crossrails). 

At that time, we had fixed-length steel crossrails on our trucks, which turned out to be important, as you will see. I got onto I-84 about 5 miles east of downtown Portland, and the 58th Avenue onramp went under the freeway and made a hard left just outside of the short tunnel.  I was going slow, but not slow enough apparently, because when I made the turn, the Datsun slid on the crossrails all the way to the right and slammed against the dollie frame.  The two dollie tires on the left came up off the ground about 2” and then rested back
onto the pavement.  I swallowed hard to get my heart out of my throat, and waited for the crossrails to fall out of the rail pockets.  I knew that only the weight of the car keeps the crossrails in the rail pockets, and since one side was temporarily hovering, even pulling the dollie tires up into midair, we were now defying the laws of science.  I was on the freeway now, with no emergency lane to work with, so I kept
going cautiously.  The left dollie tires were now sticking out about three feet past the wrecker bed, but everything held together, so I kept
  going.

If the crossrails had been telescoping crossrails, I think the Datsun’s suspension would not have slid so far or so easily, because the fixed-length crossrails are perfectly smooth.   As I approached the split to I-5, I remembered that the Steel Bridge offramp had nice right-turn angle to it, so I could correct the positioning of the Datsun on the dollie by swinging hard into the turn. These are the kinds of ideas that come into you head when you’re 25 years old, as I was at the time.

I tried the maneuver, but the exact reverse of the first shift took place, with the Datsun sliding all the way to the left, slamming against the left dollie frame, and the right dollie tires lifting off the ground and then settling.  Now the dollies were tracking three feet to the right of the wrecker bed. I was off the freeway now, so I could have stopped to make adjustments and maybe splash some water in my face,
but I was also close to the impound lot, so I just kept going.

When I got to the lot, I pulled in, put the truck in park, stepped out of the truck, and the rear crossrail fell out of both dollie frames and went “clink” as it hit the pavement.  Both ends had apparently been sitting on the “ledge,” waiting to pop out and make the entire dollie fly apart, but for some reason, neither end decided to do that.  The rest of the dollie stayed intact, with the wheelless Datsun still sitting on the front
crossrail.

I think I used up a whole lot of good luck that day, probably way more than an abandoned Datsun 510 with no wheels warranted.

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

Vehicle damage is one of those gray areas in towing that sometimes requires a crystal ball to divine the truth. Questioning drivers becomes a psychological exercise.  Outright denial is my favorite.  I called one driver shortly after he left work one day, and I explained to him that he had parked his truck a little too close to a vehicle in our storage lot.  He was driving an Eagle, and the fold cylinder had been leaking, so he flopped down the stinger before parking the truck, which was a good idea.  That way the stinger couldn't flop down on its own onto something important on its own.  Well, the problem was that he backed up a little too close to the Chrysler 300M that he was parking in front of.  "No way," he said.  "I know I didn't hit that car."  I explained to him that the end of the Eagle Claw was still inserted into the front bumper of the Chrysler.  "Someone else must have moved the truck," he said (he had been gone about 10 minutes).  Right, I said, and could he bring back the keys to the truck so we could move it away from the damaged vehicle?  Silence.I asked him if he had the keys still.  Might they be in one of his pockets? More silence.  "Yes," he finally admitted.

That conversation with the vehicle owner, when you tell them that their car has been damaged—always fun.

On another occasion, I had 2 complaints in one day for tow light damage.  Both vehicles had been towed by the same driver, from the same location, impounds.  A Mercedes SUV, and a Toyota Landcruiser.  The damage was similar, circular scratches matching the size of the round magnets used on magnetic Tow Lights, on the roof of the vehicle on the passenger-side.  The next time the driver came to the
lot, with a car in-tow, I came out and explained to him that I had received the complaints.  "No way," he said, "I'm always very careful when I take tow lights off the car."  No twisting, I asked?  "No, definitely not."  He was towing an old beater that had been abandoned, so I asked him to show me how careful he was, with the car he was towing.  He carefully lifted the tow lights off the car and put them on the back of his truck. Then I asked him to put them back on.  Rolling his eyes, he walked the lights back to the car, and carefully placed them on the car.  Then he plugged the cord back into the socket, grabbed the cord, and slung it up on top of the car from right next to the tow truck, like he’s on one end of a hellaciously long jump rope.  The cord hit the car's roof with a loud bang.  I walked over to the tow light on his side and showed him how it was now pointing sideways.  The pull on the cord was twisting the magnet around 90 degrees with gale-force whip action.  My next question, I said to him, is did you put the light back the right way without checking to see if you scratched the paint underneath, or did you drive to the lot with the light pointing sideways?

I wonder how many cars he damaged before someone looked on their roof.

One driver wanted to change a rear tire on a Chevy S10 pickup, but he didn't want to jack it up, so he lifted the rear with
his truck and placed a jackstand under the side with the flat tire.  Problem was, he placed the jackstand under the rear side panel of the truck, rather than the frame or a sturdy suspension component.  The fender folded.  At least he got the pleasure of being present when the vehicle owner witnessed the damage.

 Have a safe and profitable week.

Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com
http://www.facebook.com/#!/towpartsnow

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