My wife broke our lawn mower.
Technically, the lawn mower broke while my wife was using it, but it’s just more fun to say that my wife broke our lawn mower. I am usually the person that has my hands on anything mechanical when it decides to die or blow up so, for a change, I get to blame someone else. That doesn’t happen often, and I want to take full advantage of the opportunity.
My wife volunteered to mow the lawn recently on a Saturday to help out with some of the yard work. It was a very nice offer on her part. She sat down on our riding mower, started up the engine, then drove it into the back yard.
Two minutes later, she was back in the house telling me, “I think there’s something wrong with the lawn mower.”
I asked her what she meant by “something wrong.”
She told me, “I don’t know. It stopped working.”
I followed her outside to the back lawn, and she pointed to our mower. She had left it parked in the grass. It looked fine at first, but then I saw the problem. There was a little bit of smoke trickling from under the engine cover, and the drive belt that ran the mower blades was spooled out on the lawn underneath it like the eviscerated guts of some unfortunate animal.
“Something wrong” was a bit of an understatement.
I asked my wife to move the mower back to the garage. I said I would fix it later, knowing full well that I do not have the mechanical skills to “fix” anything more complicated than tightening a screw. (Righty tighty – lefty loosey).
Still, I figured I should give it a look.
I pulled out the owner’s manual for the mower and researched replacing the drive belt. It didn’t look that hard. The dude in the illustration on page 23 didn’t look like he was much smarter than me. And he was smiling. So, how bad could it be?
I lay down on the ground next to the mower, grabbed the belt and slipped it around the first guide wheel. The guide wheel, mounting bracket, and left mower blade all fell off of the mower and into my hands.
Okay. This was going to be a much bigger job than I originally anticipated. Time to go with plan B.
Plan B is the power equipment repair shop thirty miles away. I called the shop and told them I had a broken mower. They told me to bring it in. I explained that bringing it to them might be a bit of problem for me since I don’t have any way to transport anything bigger than a bicycle. When I asked if they could pick it up, since I don’t have a trailer to transport it, they gave me a phone number for a guy who does pick-ups and deliveries to their business.
Let me just say that part again: not a company that does pick-ups. “A guy.”
Nervous, but willing to give it a go, I called their “guy.” The phone rang a few times, then picked up.
“Yup.”
“Um. Is this … Gus?”
“Yup. Who’s this?”
“I was told you might be able to help me move my lawn mower to the repair shop. I need it picked up and transported to get it fixed.”
“Sure. I guess I could do that for you. Where do you live?”
Did any of that sound like a legitimate business transaction? Because to me it felt like the opening scene from a horror movie, and I had just invited some homicidal stranger over to my house to make me his next victim.
Gus, the delivery guy, wanted $125 to pick up the mower. I thought that was a little steep just to carry a lawn mower thirty miles away, but I was sort of stuck. My choices were to pay Gus to move it or live with a giant orange paperweight in my garage for the foreseeable future. I elected to move it.
Gus arrived later that day with his flatbed trailer, then asked for payment up front before he loaded my mower. Again, as I had limited options, I paid him.
He placed a metal ramp from the ground to the back edge of his trailer, then started to drive my mower up onto the flatbed. About halfway up, the ramp slipped off the truck and Gus and my mower came crashing back down to the ground. Gus fell off the mower and landed in the gravel that paves my driveway.
Suddenly, I wasn’t feeling so bad about the hundred and twenty-five bucks. After all, it wasn’t me sprawled out in the driveway next to a broken lawn mower.
After making sure the lawn mower hadn’t gotten any additional damage in the fall, I asked Gus if he was okay. He stood up, made sure there wasn’t any blood on him or bones jutting in odd angles, then nodded.
“Good,” I said. “We get lousy cell phone reception out here and I didn’t want to go all the way back in the house to call for an ambulance.”
Gus said some stuff, but I probably shouldn’t repeat it since I don’t have age restricting software on my blog. He wasn’t very happy.
Trying to be helpful, I reminded him that the mower still wasn’t in the trailer and the repair shop was expecting it to arrive soon. He said some other stuff I won’t repeat.
Gus was not a very pleasant person. After almost getting squashed by a lawn mower I guess I can’t really blame him for that. Eventually, he did get my mower into his trailer and he drove off to get it repaired.
The whole thing was quite an ordeal, and I still blame my wife for the whole thing. After all, she is the one who broke the lawn mower and caused the whole mess.
In a way, she almost killed Gus.
I’m going to tell him that the next time I see him. I’d rather he was mad at her than at me.
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