jimlongley wrote:Many years ago, when telephone trucks were OD green with gold bells on the sides, my boss was following "Charlie" from one job to another down a dusty country road. Boss' Dodge Dart had a "Bell Boy" mobile telephone in it, and said telephone had a switch to allow the phone to honk the horn and flash the lights when it rang, if the driver was away from the car. Every once in a while a telephone car would be observed going down the street beeping and flashing because the guy driving forgot to switch back to the internal ringer.
So Boss and Charlie are running hard and fast over Bradt Hollow Rd in Berne NY, with Boss behind in the cloud of dust from the unpaved road. And Boss' phone rang, flashing the lights and honking the horn. Charlie, in the lead and in the clear, saw Boss' lights flashing and heard the horn honking and assumed that Boss meant for him to stop, so he stomped on the brakes. And of course, just as Charlie began his sudden stop, Boss glanced down at the phone to throw the switch and then pick up the receiver.
And then boss glanced up just in time to note that when a telephone truck was braking hard, its read end had a tendency to raise up some just as he stomped on his own brakes, causing the Dart's front end to dip and plow right under the back of the phone truck. Neither was injured beyond their pride, but due to the way the phone company ran investigations into such things, they self insured, the vehicles stayed embedded like that until an adequate number of photographs were taken, photographs which circulated far and wide, and were posted an all of the local garage bulletin boards. I remember those photos well.
When the oil field was booming in South Texas, you could empty a restaurant by blowing your horn real long in the parking lot.
