Each year, we give you a break from a long winter and lighten things up with some smiles, snickers, and chuckles. There’s lots of fun stuff in here to brighten your day!

No better place to start than with a roadside encounter by Mark “Da Moose” Sternberg, Eagle Towing, Engadine, MI: Okay, anyone who knows me knows Da Moose don’t change tires. So I get dispatched to a call in this strip mall and it’s raining cats and dogs. It’s a flat tire on a Mercedes.

“Jeez,” I’m thinkin’, “Don’t see how the hell I’m gonna get out of this one!”

I find the car and there’s this older woman who’s dressed real well and now I know I’m sunk! She says, “Hi, I’m so sorry to have to call you out on a night like this and I would have changed this myself but I don’t know how.”

So I asked her, “Ya wanna learn?”

To my surprise, her answer was an emphatic “I’d love to!” So I got her spare and jack out, showed her how, and following my instructions, she changed her own tire — in the driving rain! We did the paperwork and she was so happy she gave me a 20-dollar tip. I returned to my shop, and by now every one of my other drivers had heard about this stunt and they are laughing their collective butts off!

About 45 minutes later I got a phone call from a gentleman who wanted to know our location, so I gave it to him. Another 20 minutes later a car pulled up, a man got out, came in, and identified himself as both an attorney and the lady’s husband. He asked for the manager and the driver who had assisted his wife with a flat tire earlier.

“Uh, oh,” I’m thinkin’ but I told him, “Guilty as charged on both counts.”

He began to smile, then stuck out his hand and said, “I just wanted to shake your hand ‘cause you’re a better man than I! I cannot believe you got that lazy woman off her lazy butt!”

We shook hands, and he had in his hand a 100-dollar bill that he palmed to me. He slapped me a high-five and gave me a glad hand on the back.

He left the shop with everyone there cracking up. But they, and now you, know: It pays to be Da Moose.

And here’s two from Scott Burrows, Burrows Garage & Wrecker Service, Pendleton, KY. This one is “The Trashed Can:” The recovery of a tractor-trailer collision had taken much longer than expected, and with nature calling insistently, a trash can inside the sleeper bunk of my tow truck was utilized as a replacement for a Porta-Potty.

Since the smell from the trash can was overwhelming, I chose to place the trash can near the debris field of the crash, tucked away inconspicuously behind some of the twisted metal and torn fiberglass parts. I thought nothing more of it, sharing my story some time later that day with my employees.

The next day, we were again tasked with a tractor-trailer roll-over; and, as luck would have it, the same environmental response crew was engaged for the fuel spill cleanup. At some point during the interaction between the response crew and the tow operators, the conversation somehow shifted to the previous day’s events, and the tow operators disclosed the subterfuge of my previous “HazMat” disposal.

The clean-up crew immediately burst out laughing, disclosing that they had “recovered” the trash can, and it had spent the night in the back of a closed cargo van, polluting the atmosphere quite literally. And they still had the trash can with them as they had not completely restocked and reloaded their response vehicle. The offending trash can was then offered to our crew, for proper documentation and disposal, per Kentucky statutes, of course, by the clean-up guys. The stinkers!

This one Scott calls “Ear Not:” We were called to the scene of a roll-over tractor-trailer accident, and found that the driver was still trapped in the cab of the truck. We assisted the EMS and fire department in extricating him, and after initial treatment, he was loaded into the ambulance, which left the scene.

Shortly thereafter, one of my operators found the severed ear of the driver resting on the dash of the semi.

Several of the responders were queried as to how to get the body part to the hospital for possible re-attachment to the driver. It was my suggestion to “send it ‘ear-mail.’” I’m glad that driver didn’t hear me!

And from our favorite source of internet jokes, Ron Converse of Loretto Towing, Loretto, MN, a recovery story we call “Can’t Fix Stupid:” The owner of a Komatsu wasn’t smiling but we laughed all the way to the bank after our “ice fishing” day.

We got a call on a Saturday afternoon in mid-February 2011. An excavator is in Lake Minnetonka, the caller said. The lake is about 20 miles west of Minneapolis and has more miles of lake shore than all but one other lake in Minnesota. The temperature was about 25 above when we started on our way, which is above average for this time of year. The residents around this lake have above-average incomes. The developers dug canals from the lake to the residential areas so that the owners could park their boats right behind their homes. The walls around the canals are straight up and down.

Here’s what we found when we arrived at the scene — we still haven’t figured out who thought the following was a good idea: The developer’s latest objective was to dredge the canal because over the years sediment had run down from the lawns and into the canal. The operator drove the Komatsu excavator onto the iced-over canal and punched a hole in the ice, which was only about two feet thick.

Guess what happened next? Yep, you’re right.

Anyway, here’s the rest of the story: We couldn’t get our Freightliner Interstater anywhere near the Komatsu and it was getting late in the afternoon. We decided to wait until Sunday and bring in some reinforcements. We rounded up a Cat 315C excavator and winched it down the hill and parked it up against a tree stump that was buried in the snow. You could just barely see the back end of our Freightliner way up the hill.

My original plan was to have the Cat lift the Komatsu enough so we could pull it up over the vertical wall but we couldn’t lift it. The operator did manage to swing it around so that it was facing the wall then move it a little from side to side as we pulled from side to side with him.

It was a slow process but we finally got it up on solid (frozen) ground. We destroyed the neighbor’s lawn but fortunately the owner of the Komatsu had made arrangements for that before we began. Too bad he didn’t think further ahead earlier before driving heavy equipment onto thin ice!