Man With a Truck
by Mark Rast

I was trying to save a few bucks. That’s all.

The adventure started when I somehow managed to come up with enough down payment to purchase myself a nice little condominium in a stylishly renovated mill building 20 miles up the road from where I was currently living. Divorced and renting for the past two years, I was anxious to move forward, out of my apartment and into a little equity. But divorce is an expensive process, and even though I’d managed to bamboozle a loan officer into thinking I could actually afford all of this, the truth was, I was broke. The closing costs and legal fees of buying my little condo had wiped me out, and now I could barely afford a can of soup, let alone the cost of hiring a professional moving company to help me haul all of my tattered stuff to my new little castle. I needed to save a couple of bucks.

So I made a decision. I guess you could call it a no-brainer. You could call it that because it clearly demonstrated that I had no brain.

I responded to a classified ad that read… “Man with a truck. $25 per hour.”

My thinking here was that I really didn’t have that much stuff—I really didn’t. Divorce had taken care of that—and I thought that with a little help and reasonable effort, I could move myself. I figured it would take three or four hours and maybe a little elbow grease. What could it cost? $100? What could go wrong? A pulled muscle?

Enter the man with the truck. We’ll call him Bob.

Bob was a nice enough guy, but he had the aura of someone who spent a lot of time scraping his shoe bottom on the edge of the curb. A certifiable hard luck case. A walking talking illustration of the term “Life ain’t fair.” Looking at him I got the sense that he’d spent most of his childhood watching the ice cream fall off his cone.

But, whatever, I figured—I wasn’t there to save him, just employ him for a couple of hours. Who knew? A little work, a little money, a little self-esteem… Maybe I would be the beginning of a long string of good fortunes for Bob. All he had to do was put my stuff in the back of his pick-up and safely drive it 20 miles to my new home. So we loaded him up and off he went.

The plan was for Bob to take the bigger, cumbersome pieces safely in his truck while I stuffed as many non-breakable leftovers into my car as possible. I let him go ahead while I packed a few final items, telling him that I would be only ten or fifteen minutes behind. That was the plan.

Fifteen minutes later, my plans and me were on the road to ruin.

As I made the final turn onto the road that would take me down the hill to the front entrance of my new building, I was looking forward to a bright future; then I looked out the driver side window at something that just didn’t seem right. There were people moving around excitedly on the sidewalk of a house that sat back twenty yards or so from the road. To my astonishment, I realized one of these people was Bob. Bob and I made eye contact. Bob looked like life had just served him up another ice cream cone. Then I saw it—the green pick-up truck and all of my furniture—smashed up against the house and spread out across the lawn like a scoop of mint chocolate chip melting on a hot sidewalk.

Bob, it turns out, had stopped to buy a cool drink at the convenience store at the top of the hill. He had forgotten to put on his emergency brake. Bob had really stepped into it this time, only this time he was wearing my shoes.

And did Bob have insurance? Do you have to ask? The replacement costs would be all mine. That was the bad news. The good news was that nobody got hurt and most of my stuff was junk anyway, so in the end it didn’t really matter. And I did learn a valuable moving lesson about cutting corners. Hopefully, now you have too.