After Christmas, we decided to visit some friends 800 miles away. I was driving all day and I was ready to look for a hotel but before I can Do that I realized that we are stuck in the middle of the interstate because of an accident on the road that involved multiple vehicles.
Because there was more than 1 vehicle involved and from what I heard also fatalities, we had to wait until the road was cleared.
The problem was that it was late at night and not enough 24 hours towing service available for the big job. It took a long time until towing trucks from the nearby city arrived and the road was cleared.
Most of us waiting for the road to be cleared got out of our cars and started to socialize with each other. Between these people was an older man, Henry, who was a tow truck driver for 20 years before he retired.
Most of us have a negative experience with towing companies that illegally towed vehicles but Henry had too many interesting stories not to listen too.
Our time passed by so fast while listening to his stories, not because how interesting they were but because the way he was telling the story.
I decided to share some of his stories with you.
Henry was telling me that he has a story that he thinks at almost every day. One day the police called him for a lockout job. One driver locked his keys in the car and needed help unlocking his car. After the job was done and the car was unlocked, the driver started to act suspiciously so the police decided to search his car. What they found was shocking. Almost 40 bags of an illegal drug that will put that driver to jail for a long time. But the question that remained on Henry’s main all this years is why did the driver knowing what he has in the car called the police to help him unlock the car?
One time he had to pull out a car suspended in a tree in a ditch. Luckily the 2 men inside the car were not hurt but they were so scared that they were shaking for 2 hours.
One late night he was called by a lady who had a flat tire. When he arrived she was in her car listening to the music at her radio with no flashlight on, no triangle. She didn’t even knew if she has an emergency wheel in her trunk or not. She did so Henry was able to help her and explained to her that next time when she need a towing trucks help she needs to have her triangle set up, a reflecting vest on and she needs to get out of the care and wait for the towing truck to arrive in a safe place, not in her car. I was noggin my head but the truth is I didn’t know all this.
It was a long and interesting night as the cleaning took almost all night but listening to Henry telling his stories made the time pass so fast that we didn’t even realized how long we were waiting.