Oops.

In honor of Liberty, who turned 19 this past Sunday, a story.

Liberty works in the fertilizer department at a grain elevator. She drives a semi, a fertilizer spreader (tractor) and skid steer all on a regular basis. One day last week, she was working at the elevator when a part broke in the mechanism that begins as a floor grate that the trucks dump into that is then a chute that moves the fertilizer into the different bins. She was in the elevator’s (read: not the fertilizer department’s, but had borrowed the main office’s) skid steer moving fertilizer. She was in a giant bin with the skid steer when it broke down. Completely died. Her boss was up fixing the broken “leg” (chute the fertilizer goes through into bins)… she thought. She abandoned the dead skid steer and went to work in the office until her boss could help her with the dead skid steer.

He comes in a bit later. She begins to tell him about the skid steer. He croaks. The skid steer that’s dead in the bin in now buried in the 100,000 pounds of urea that he’d just hauled in a double-trailered semi and dumped into the bin from the top.

After a good bit of scooping around the skid steer with another one, some hand shoveling, and a lot of sweaty labor, the dead skid steer was dragged from its grave. It was repaired and soon will be returned, only slightly covered in urea, to the main office.