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Morgan McArthur, DVM for
Vetscript
5 October 00
It happened to me in South Auckland
one Saturday night. Some say I shouldn’t be surprised.
I was there some weeks ago speaking
to a group of equine retailers. You know, people who sell saddles,
tall boots and velvet hard hats… It was one of those nights where
everything went well and we had a gutbusting good time.
When the post-speech surge of
adrenaline/endorphins was wearing off my wife and I levitated out of
the venue toward the car. I came back to earth two steps into the
parking lot. Across the tarmac I could see that my car was listing to
the right.
Damn! A punctured tyre...
As we got closer I could
see that there was more. Or rather, less. There were no
tyres. OR WHEELS! Nude disc brakes gleamed from four empty
wheelwells. There was only a jack on one side, a block on the other,
and a litter of lugnuts scattered about. GRRRRRRREAT! The wheels had
been stolen from a car parked in plain view of a busy road and in
front of the hotel reception area!
If extreme joy is a warm yellow-white
emotion like sunshine, then what I was feeling was a throbbing blend
of black rimmed with red, like a contusion. Bad blood builds pressure
and every pounding heartbeat is a reminder that it’s there.
My opinions on what kind of people
did this pulsed to the surface. I was angry as a bruise is ugly.
Ever notice how trauma
combined with time has a numbing effect? When the towtruck driver
finally arrived well after midnight I was pretty collected. Until he
got out of his truck. Tattooed. Dirty. Gap-toothed grin. Dark beanie
pulled to the eyebrows. AAAAAAGH! HE WAS ONE
OF THEM!!
My snap impression: Here’s a Badboy
Towie who’s probably no stranger to the car conversion industry…
Then I thought, ‘Hang on, would a
real thief wear that day-glow orange vest? Why would he be driving a
tow truck? And working alone?’ I reluctantly reasoned that he might
just be on my side…
In the next two hours I came to
realise that he was. By the end of hell night I had discovered
several surprising things about Ted the Towie. Here was a towtruck
driver who was frequently requested to attend fatal crashes because
he was good with people in bad circumstances. He had compassion. Here
was a towtruck driver who worked from 7 PM to 7 AM six nights a week
so he could both support his family and be home during the day with
his five children. He was a committed father. And here was a towtruck
driver who was squeezing in courses to become a police officer. He
had ambition (and little need for sleep).
By 3 AM he’d removed his black
beanie and we were mates. I’ve since concluded that Ted was the
right man to have around at the wrong time.
I learned several lessons from this
experience. One: locking lug nuts are a good investment if you want
to keep your wheels. Two: bad experiences make for good stories. And
Three: be careful not to prejudge people and treat them unfairly. You
never know who’ll come along to help you out when you’re having a
wheely bad day.
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