Recruitment and hiring have to be one of the most arduous tasks we face in this industry.  Unfortunately, it seems to be a daily task at times as we try to find and keep good employees.  In my time managing a tow company, I vacillated between hiring drivers with towing experience so that they could be trained quickly and hiring drivers without towing experience so that we didn't have to un-train their bad habits.

Many, many times I regretted the choices I made, usually the choice to find a warm body, but when you've covered extra shifts yourself and begged others to do so for weeks at a time, it is a very attractive option to hire anyone who can fog a mirror.  This is a conundrum that cannot be solved in a newsletter, or a year of newsletters for that matter, but now that I no longer face the problem, I can ponder it without a rise in my blood pressure.

I've worked with some shady individuals in this business, to be sure.  I'm all about forgiveness and fresh-starts (ask my wife), but in business sometimes you have to go by the numbers.  If someone has displayed a serious lack of judgment at some point in their life, the chances are better that they will do so again.  If they've done so enough times that the law actually caught up with them, there's a distinct possibility that it's become a habit.

I think I've written before about the most interesting of these examples, a driver who walked in one day claiming he'd been driving tow trucks in Australia for ten years and impressed my boss so much that he hired him immediately.  He was a crafty one--got in the truck and starting towing cars like he'd been doing it for 20 years.  Thing is, he hadn't ever driven a tow truck, and he was using the name and identity of a deceased person to elude warrants for Workers' Compensation fraud and writing some bad checks.  They nailed him when he applied for a Social Security card.

Sometime after 9/11, the County Sheriff's office started running background checks on our new and prospective employees, and this turned out to be a very valuable recruitment tool for us.  One of the Deputies would give me a call if there was anything unusual, and it kept us from hiring people who'd done time for drug offenses, sexual crimes, and armed robbery.  Some of these people interviewed quite well.  Some were related or married to other employees we already had.

One disturbing thing about this new policy was when it was first instituted and they ran the background checks on our current employees.  A few of them, it turned out, had quite interesting records, including a dispatcher with multiple drunk-driving convictions, and a bookkeeper who'd been convicted of stealing money from his former employer.  This was kind of tricky to deal with, but it was certainly valuable information.

I suppose we're not far away from the day when we do an eye scan or wave our hand over something and up will pop our criminal background, family history, credit rating, life expectancy, and favorite drink.  I'm ready.  I have nothing to hide. It will be interesting for me as well, since I don't remember a lot of things I've done.

One of the most interesting episodes from the County Sheriff background check program was the one they didn't give us the heads-up on.  After an employee passed the background check and was hired by us, within 30 days they had to go to the County facility and get a special photo ID, which they had to carry with them while working and present to any County employee upon request.  One driver I hired passed the background check, and started dragging his heels about getting the ID.  After a few weeks, the Deputy in charge of the program called and asked about this driver.  I assured him that it was simply a matter of convenience and reminded the driver that his employment hinged on this issue.  He kept coming up with excuses.  After the 30 days had passed, I gave him one last chance and restricted him from running any County calls.  A few days later, the Deputy called me and admitted that he had misled us.  The employee was wanted on open warrants in another state, for a variety of fraud-related activities.  They asked when his next scheduled shift started, and they were waiting for him when he arrived.  They had apparently wanted him to simply stroll into their facility to get his photo ID, where they would slap the scuffs on him (why are cuffs always "slapped").  My question: when the employee became aware that the County REALLY wanted to see him in person and kept calling me to ask when he would be in, wouldn't you get the idea that the jig was up?  My other question: didn't the Deputy care about the possibility of this wanted felon victimizing our business or our employees?  Talk about a liability issue.  I hate to say it, but I think it came down to an issue of territory--our main office was in downtown Portland, so the bust had to be carried out by the Portland PD, but if the employee went to the County facility, the County Sheriff would get to make the nab.

Of course, I made sure I was at work when the bust went down, just in case I needed to engage in the mayhem, and the employee cursed me up and down for my betrayal, claiming that the charges were trumped-up.  Someone had stolen his identity, he claimed, and had gone on a crime spree, and he had been on-the-lam for months trying to clear his name, not unlike Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, or Sir Charles Litton in Return of the Pink Panther.

It's these kinds of dramas that add a little spice to the workday, don't you think?

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

http://www.hub911.com

http://www.essentialnow.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

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

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

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

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


 

Spent some time on the phone recently with my good friend Kim who owns a tow company on Oahu.  We were talking about how we both "backed into" this business, almost against our will.  It reminded me of my humble beginnings in the industry, over 30 YEARS AGO, which is amazing because I'm only 38.

Okay, maybe not 38.

My older brother and my brother-in-law got jobs driving tow truck for Marty Oppenlander at Hillsboro Towing in Hillsboro, Oregon, in the mid-70s (wow, Marty, how old are YOU?). This gave my dad the CRAZY idea that he should buy a tow truck company to take advantage of their “expertise.”  Regardless of how strenuously people tried to stop him, he did it anyway.

My first "job" in the industry was to answer phones and run the storage yard through the summer when I was 15.  8 am-6 pm, Monday-Friday.  I got to live with my older brother, so that was fun.  Often I was out running calls with him all night and all weekend as well.  My
"salary?"  $200 per month.  Plus room and board, of course.

Some fun things I remember:
1. Helping to recover a Combine that rolled down a steep hill and crashed through some trees and had to be pulled up through the stumps about 300 yards.  When we got it out and hooked up to it, the heavy-duty wrecker we had kept slipping on the grassy field as we tried to drive up the steep incline.  It was another 1000 yards up to the road, so we didn't want to have to move-and-winch our way up.  My brother drove his short-box Chevy 4x4 down and we chained it to the front of the wrecker, and just that little bit of extra power got us up the hill.  Would have made a great video for GM.

2. Helping my brother-in-law paint an old convertible MG for a local police officer, and the spray gun wasn't working too well, so we were about halfway into the job when the runs in the paint were looking real bad.  My brother-in-law poked a hole in the paper covering the vehicle interior and drove off to a REAL body shop to sub-contract the work, with his head stuck out of the hole so that was all you could see of him as he drove down the road with the car still taped and papered (and half-painted).  He kind of looked like Mr. Bean.

The business didn't work out so well for my dad, so I SWORE that I would never work in towing.  Then, of course, in my early twenties,
my brother-in-law called me because he was managing a company and needed a driver.  The rest is history.  That was 1986.  Sometimes
I'm asked if I ever think about leaving the industry.  My pat answer: "Daily."  But here I am.  The industry seems to have its hooks in me, so to speak.  I imagine there are many of you out there who share that feeling.

Have a
safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper

www.TowPartsNow.com