View from the North 40: Barely functional, even when functioning

We had that weird dry spring, so I scheduled a week off to get some work done outside — I even booked a rental tractor to help with the work — and then the skies opened up and it rained all that week. I canceled the tractor, but kept the vacation, which turned out to be a good move on my part. I slept all that week and kind of stared at the walls as if I’d had a chemical lobotomy. Apparently, I needed a little down time.

But not this week.

I am on vacation from the office this week. The weather has been beautiful, I have the little tractor and I’m getting a lot of work done.

But that’s not really what I want to talk about.

I just want to take a moment to be grateful for my original tractor week getting rained out earlier in the year because, honestly, if my brain was in sleepy-time, wall-staring mode I had no business operating new machinery.

My first day on the tractor this week I felt like the part of my brain that develops muscle memory was suffering from some form of dementia. Happily, it was a temporary brain development issue, but I could’ve died from it under other circumstances.

I have only one lever and two pedals to operate. The lever moves forward and back to lower and raise the bucket and side to side to tilt the bucket. The front pedal moves the tractor forward. You take your foot off it to press on the other pedal with your heel to go backward. It’s not rocket science.

Sure the tractor has other levers, most for functions I’m not using, like for a backhoe or a three-point hitch. The power range is a set-it-and-forget-it deal and the gas is pretty much, too. I haven’t used the brakes yet, just the forward and backward pedals.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, right?

In defense of my incompetence, I wasn’t raised on machinery, not like the farm and ranch kids who are sent out on a tractor to feed a herd of cows in the snow or plow a field when they’re only 5 years old, like it’s a prerequisite for entering kindergarten. I was in my late teens before we even got a riding lawnmower, and I had to share that with my brothers.

Plus, within the previous month I had worked my arena with a large tractor I’ve just started driving, I unloaded and stacked 30 round bales of hay with the forklift and spent 10 days mowing with my riding mower. All of the levers and pedals are different.

Our forklift is the worst of them. Built long before the video game joystick was ever imagined the forklift has three levers: one to raise and lower the forks, one to set the tilt forward and back, and one to move the forks side to side. I couldn’t get all three lever operations correct on the first try to save my own life.

I mean, of course, I’d try — it is my life and I’m aware I only have one of them and it’s precious — but if I’m honest, it would save time and humiliation to just say, “I have to tilt the forks forward, slide them to the left and drop them to the ground, each direction correct on the first try or I die suddenly? OK just kill me now, dude, and stop with your cruel mind games.”

First thing I’d do is slide the forks right and have to die twice because I not only went the wrong direction, I also grabbed the wrong lever in the first place.

As of this morning, though, I just have a few hours of work left with the tractor. I’m feeling pretty confident about my ability so, figuring that the rental company must decide what equipment to buy based on the mental capacity of the most simple-minded person who would rent the machine, I’m thinking of moonlighting as their product tester.

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I’m not quite ready to hire out my services as an operator, though, at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .