Mr. Grumpy Vs. The Snow Plow Driver

(10 am, – promoted by ek hornbeck)

It’s pretty obvious who wins this battle.

The moral to the story is: Don’t piss off a Snow Plow Truck Driver.  So feel free to skip the rest of this post.  What follows is all of the useless details that make the story extra funny to me and perhaps my family.

The story starts three days ago at about six o’clock in the evening.  Our land line rang and the caller ID said it was city hall.  Because none of us owe city hall any money, we figured it was safe to answer.  It was a robocall from our newly elected small town mayor.  We call him Mayor NoNeck Jr. due to the physical deformities caused by his steroid use while he was in high school.  (We feel Mayor NoNeck Jr. is a kinder nickname than the one for his other steroid induced deformity.) It’s kind of tough to blame the poor kid for juicing.  His father, a known juicer himself, has been the high school football coach for the last twenty some years.

As part of the new reverse 911 system the young Mayor NoNeck was calling to inform us that he had declared a snow emergency and that there was a parking ban.  No parking on the streets of our tiny town for the next 48 hours.

We were expecting three to six inches of snow overnight followed by rain, followed by sleet, followed by freezing rain in the morning, followed by another three to six inches of snow overnight followed by rain, followed by sleet, followed by freezing rain the next morning.

What we found the first morning was only three inches of snow with a crusty top about a half inch thick.  It was raining but I figured it was better to lift three inches of slush twice than to try to lift six inches of icy slush once.  I should mention we do have one of those new modern snow blowers; however we’ve found that if the snow is actually heavy enough that you’d want to use it, that’s when it’s too heavy for the machine.  

I started shoveling the driveway where it meets the road.  Our home is on the side of a hill and the steep part of the driveway is towards the street.  I thought I’d get a head start by doing a quick first pass on the hard part before the apron was plowed in.  No plows had hit our road… yet.  

Our neighbor, Mr. Grumpy, had parked his new pickup on the road along the twenty feet between our two driveways.  It’s a nice truck. 4 wheel drive with all the bells and whistles.  Mr. Grumpy doesn’t talk to any of the neighbors because…well…he’s grumpy.  

When the Grumpy family purchased their property a few years ago they had their cousin, a Registered Land Surveyor, measure their yard out based on one monument at the bottom of the street. By their cousin’s measurements our 70 year old retaining wall was 5 feet over their property line at the back end of the yard and even with the line where the property meets the road. Within a week contractors were cutting down our trees and putting up a fence in our yard. It was your typical suburban neighborhood property line dispute. Our family hired a lawyer and our own land surveyor.  Our surveyor registered his map with city hall.  We went to court and won.  It turns that out our entire block has property lines that are at 89 degree angles and you need to use more than one monument to accurately draw the lines.  Had Mr. Grumpy hired a decent surveyor, rather than his cousin, maybe we wouldn’t know him as Mr. Grumpy.  

I was making good time. I had cleared about the first 10 feet of heavy slush in about twenty minutes and my boots weren’t even close to being soaked through yet.  I might have made it most of the way through the driveway with dry feet if I could keep up the pace.  It turns out I wouldn’t get that lucky.  I was distracted by an “incident”.

A snow plow appeared down the hill at the bottom our street and he was headed up our side of the road.  The plow guy made it half way up to Mr. Grumpy’s truck, stopped, and started on his horn.  The horn sounded like an air raid alert, loud enough to wake the dead. He hung on the horn for nearly ten minutes waiting for someone at Mr. Grumpy’s house to respond. The whole time he was looking at me as if it was MY truck blocking the way.  I walked to the end of the driveway with my back to Mr. Grumpy’s house, shrugged my shoulders at the plow driver and surreptitiously pointed towards the Grumpy’s.  

The plow guy got out of his truck, went to Grumpy’s front door, rang the bell and pounded on the door until someone finally answered.  He told them the pickup truck had to be moved and went back to his plow.  

He waited another 3 minutes and then started on the horn again.  By this time my family had joined me in the driveway worried I had fallen under the plow and other neighbors had come outside to see what all the commotion was about.  

After another minute of horn blowing, the plow guy had lost all patience.  He backed up his plow a half a car length, adjusted the angle of his blade, turned his wheels and headed forward pushing a half a block worth of snow straight into Mr. Grumpy’s driveway.  He backed up again and narrowly slid past the pickup and headed the rest of the way up the hill.  At the top of the block the plow guy turned around and headed back down the hill.  

By this time Mr. Grumpy was finally outside to move his pickup. He went to the end of his driveway and met the plow truck driver on his way back down the hill.  

The plow truck driver rolled down his window.  Words were exchanged. Among them: “Where am I supposed to move my truck?” followed by “It’s supposed to be in your driveway!” The rest of the words were swears.

The snow plow driver left and never returned to finish clearing our road.  Mr. Grumpy took his keys and ground his 4 wheel drive pickup through the three foot high snowbank into his driveway.  

Later while my family gathered in our kitchen to dry off and chuckle about Mr. Grumpy’s misfortune I remarked about how the snow plow driver looked a lot like our Mayor NoNeck Jr.  

Maybe he was a NoNeck cousin?

Maybe not all nepotism is bad.