Sure, this is a little weird, but I just felt I had to share.

The "tires" on my forklift got replaced.

My job requires me to drive a forklift. A little thing...we call it a BT (I think that's the company that made it), but you stand as you operate it, and the forks are only maybe a couple feet long, so it's not like I drive this huge honkin' thing. There are two little swivel-wheels underneath (like on a shopping cart) which are maybe 6 inches in diameter, and I'm sure there's another larger wheel that actually powers the thing, but it's too far underneath to really see. The swivel wheels have a kind of hard rubber tire - not pneumatic like a car. Last night a sizeable chunk of the left tire finally wore out and fell off, leaving a gap of about an inch or two. This results in a relatively violent shaking when driving the lift...it's going "ca-chunk-ca-chunk" every 1/10th of a second. Now, I'm used to a moderate level of vibration with this thing, and this has happened to me before. Basically, it's very uncomfortable and most of the time whatever you're trying to carry on the forks is sliding off (and if it fell it would be bad).

But I show up to work today (working Saturday this week...not fun to truncate my weekend, but fortunately things went pretty smoothly), and there are two new tires on the truck. And the ride was smoooooooth, like buttah. I think it ran smoother than I had ever felt in my whole three months working there so far. And it felt good. :) It was actually enough to brighten my mood a little bit and I made for a long drive down the hall (and I need all the mood-lightening I can muster some days). Whee!
posted by Tim at 2:47 AM