This was originally posted back in 2005. I was fortunate to find it by using the “Wayback Machine” (Internet Archive @ www.archive.org), since I’ve managed to lose most of my content prior to about 2007…
Sadly both friends from this post have passed on. I miss them a lot and I think this story will give you a feel for the kind of fun and friendship we had.
Original post: July 19, 2005:
I should have known when my friend Bob went down on the ice of the hillside that trouble awaited us.
We were helping our friend Steve move some items from his in-laws-to-be, to the home he and his new wife would be occupying. Mainly, we were there to transplant a spare refrigerator from the basement to it’s new residence a short distance away.
The first clue trouble was ahead should have been the fact that it was January. The next should have been the glare of ice on the lawn leading down to the back entrance of the house. Did you know that when snow melts then freezes again, the result can be slippery? Three reasonably intelligent adult males and that fact somehow didn’t set off any alarm bells.
As we made our way down the hill and around the back, Bob took a pretty hard fall, sliding toward the side of the house. Steve and I were having our own troubles staying upright when we finally made it into the safety of the basement. Despite the fact the ceiling height was about 5 feet and we all banged our foreheads multiple times, we still needed to get the refrigerator back to the vehicle. The theory was, after our adventures getting to the basement, we should strap the ‘fridge to a hand truck and try to take a slightly different route back to the U-Haul (or whatever the vehicle of choice was, I can’t quite recall) so as to avoid the skating rink on the hillside. Even though there was still snow on the ground in line with the path we were planning, it seemed like a safer bet to have it under foot than the other form of frozen water. It *sounded* like a good plan at the time…
Steve chose to steer the appliance from behind while Bob and I guided the thing from the front. That part was going OK, and we were making slow but steady progress until we got to a little rise in the lawn that required a bit of heaving on Steve’s part and a fair bit of shoving on Bob’s and my part.
At this point, you need to know that Steve had elected to wear treadless deck shoes for our little moving adventure and you also need to know that neither Bob nor I knew this.
While Steve was heaving to help pull the ‘fridge up the little rise, his shoes’ lack of tread became an issue…and both his feet slipped out from under him. Remember, he had the hand truck and appliance tipped toward him while he was backing up the little rise. When pressure overcame friction, the whole shebang landed on top of him. After a second or so of surprise, I lost my composure. If I had a camera and had been cruel enough to think of it, I would have snapped a picture or two. It was like something from a Saturday morning cartoon. Here was a refrigerator laying in the snow, two arms extending from the sides at the top and two legs sticking out of the bottom…and Steve yelling for us to get the thing off of him. He didn’t sound like he had been hurt and frankly, I was laughing so hard that when Bob and I got the load off of him, I had to sit down in the snow to regain my self control. Thankfully, the hand truck and the mushy ground had helped to prevent any injuries to poor Steve.
I’m not sure what the moral of the story is here, but I can tell you that snow, deck shoes and refrigerators are not a good combination in the middle of January, particularly when you add three supposedly intelligent males to the mix.
