Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Guts and grunts

I was recently stopped at a red light behind a huge work truck, the kind with a cherry-picker lift. I became fascinated with the stacks of locking drawers on the back of the truck with carefully stenciled labels. Two drawers, in particular, caught my eye:

 RUBBER GUTS and  GRUNT BAGS
 
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what would be in those drawers. Then I thought about how fearless those workers have to be to lean out from a cherry-picker into wires or trees, and I realized they need guts to do that job! Maybe there are times when it is so scary in the bucket, they need extra courage. Maybe the drawer is so you can pull out a pile of rubber guts to augment your own. Do you wear them? Ingest them? Juggle them? Whatever, I hope they help.

I could more easily imagine what the grunt bags might be for. I'll bet that drawer holds large bags to hand to the people who are on the job but doing nothing useful. We’ve all seen them: they stand around pointing, chatting, spitting . . . while the worker is sweating bullets in the cherry-picker. The useless people could be handed a grunt bag and told to get to work picking up street refuse. Or . . . perhaps the worker in the bucket could drop them over the heads of those workers who are not doing their share!

When the traffic light changed, I couldn’t help but think how rubber guts and grunt bags might be useful at my house. I can think of times they’d come in handy.

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