Carys Weldon Blog
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
I promised you (funny?)I promised you something funny and true yesterday. First, I'm gonna brag about my husband...who is my hero and pretty damn cool, imo. Then, I'll get to the story. But the bragging sets up the story, so it's not completely unrelated. So, you're gonna get mining lesson 101.
My husband worked at the Nevada Test Site, which, back in the days he was there, did a lot of nuclear testing. He was really pretty cool and amazing--the youngest boss in the NTS tunnels. He was in charge of miners that made the tunnels that they put the bombs in, and then the crew that went in afterward to clean up the nuclear/radioactive mess. Lots of explosives and danger. (There were other bosses, and a lot that were higher up, but he was just the youngest one.)
Did I mention my husband has three world records in mining? Two he got on the test site--drilling the most feet of tunnel with the Jackleg (like a jack hammer)in an eight hour shift--we're talking serious manual labor, heavy lifting required. AND drilling the most footage of tunnel with a continuous mining machine in an eight hour shift. That's a big boring machine. His third world record came when he was asked to come out of retirement to run a MOLE which is a big honking boring machine. He first retired at age 32.
(He's a retirement king. Does it a lot. Then gets begged out of rest and relaxing living.) Anyhow, that machine was one that only about 5 Americans had the skills to run--at the time. And, if I remember right, (which is always questionable), three were out of the country, running the big machine in France, and the other was seriously old and refused to come out of retirement. So, I'm saying my husband wasn't their first choice because he was young, very young to be put on the most expensive mining equipment in the country (and world.)
There's only a few of them in existence, actually. They are called TBM's. (Real original. Tunnel Boring Machine.) Here's the wikipedia link that shows a picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_boring_machine
Cooler still is the google images on world's largest tunnel boring machines:
http://images.google.com/images?um=1&tab=wi&hl=en&q=biggest+tunnel+boring+machine+in+the+world
Okay, so the bragging's over for the moment. But, suffice it to say, it's pretty damn cool to brag about--especially when I talk to miner's wives. My big italian is super awesome in his field of occupation. I swear, the last time he retired (or the time before that)--we unlisted our phone number, you couldn't even find us on the web--which is hard work, let me tell ya. And some big wig from a mining company managed to hunt us down anyway to offer Tony a job.
I think one of the big points here is...Tony's pretty damn bright. Sometimes the most mechanically oriented guy on his jobs. Which makes the boneheads really stand out, I think.
So (the story)--
Two of the guys he worked with at the Nevada Test Site had stopped at the bar on the way home, and got totally blitzed. It was real late. The sun had gone down. And it was a spare moon night. They should NOT have been driving themselves anywhere. We're talking super sloshed beyond reason--and they didn't have a lot of that beforehand.
So, they're driving home, and they hit something. Picture two drunks, happily smiling, sloppily rocking to the radio, chatting their asses off. And all the sudden they hit something.
(Now, this is how they told the story.)
The driver immediately hits his brakes, going, "Oh. Shit. I think I hit something."
As they skid to a halt, it is obvious they are dragging something.
The other guy says, "No shit, Sherlock. You know you fucking hit something."
"God, I hope I didn't kill anything."
"It wasn't big enough to be a burro."
"Fuck." The driver pops his door open to take a look, and leans over to see under the car.
At the same time, the passenger does the same thing. Except he is so blitzed, he falls out.
The driver has a heart attack (okay, not literally, but damn near) because all he can see when he gets upside down, peering under the car, hanging on to the steering wheel so he won't fall out, IS A BODY.
His friend's body. But he's too snockered to realize that.
He yells, "Oh, shit! I ran over somebody!" And he falls out of the car, wetting his pants.
The passenger is so inebriated that he closed his eyes when he hit the pavement. As his friend yells, he pops his eyes open and thinks the same thing.
"Oh, God! He looks like shit. I think you mauled him to death. You must have dragged him with the front tire."
"Jesus." The driver shakes his head, pushes himself to get up.
The passenger screams, "Oh, God! You didn't kill him. The fucker's getting up!" He drags himself up and into the car.
The driver does the same, and in a hurry.
The passenger says, "If we drive away, he can't kick our asses or sue us."
So, they drive on. The driver looks in the rear view and says, "Where did he go?"
The passenger turns around and can't see anything because it's pitch dark. "Jesus. You think you made a zombie?"
"You think he walked off already?"
"Well, he ain't back there."
The driver hit the accelerator, just wanting to put some distance between them and the undead guy they ran over. They drove in silence for a bit.
Then, the passenger said, "You smell like piss."
"You try running somebody over. That was fuckin' shocking. I couldn't help it."
The passenger cocks his head sideways, looking at his buddy, and says, "You know what?"
"What?"
"You look a helluva lot like that dead guy."
The driver glanced over at his friend, then frowns as he realizes that his buddy looks a lot like the dead guy he saw.
"That's weird," he says, contemplating the whole thing.
He's a little slow to begin with, and then the beer buzz on top of it, had his processes working on snail speed, but eventually he figured it out.
BUT when they sit around and tell the story, he lets his buddy tell it. Because his friend never did put two and two together. And when his friend walks away, he always lingers, snickering, to tell the funniest part of the story--which is that his friend still thinks they hit somebody.
He thinks that is funny as hell.
Do you?
I laughed out loud the first time I heard the story. I mean, two drunks thinking they saw a dead body but it's just their friend leaning out to see. That's pretty funny, imo. But then, I think we've already proven that I'm easily amused.
On a scale of 1-10, how funny is this story to you? I put it at a 7 at least.
1 Comments:
I give it a 10. It's too bizarre to be anything less!
By 
Keanan Brand, at
1:22 AM
