In Reply to: A quart of red on the floor posted by Mike Jackson on July 17, 19102 at 09:10:35:
Paint Spills
One fine day in the Navy, during a duty weekend and gale force winds, a buddy of mine and I were ordered to paint the king post. In the wind, up high. Good idea. I was content just to fiddle around and stall all day, municipal employee fashion, until it got dark, because I won’t go up high, but Rick climbed up there with a gallon of Haze Grey, and just as he got to a starting place the wind took the whole can away from him -- also at the exact same time as the two Military Masterminds who ordered the job came walking around the corner and got their uniforms ruined. Ha ha. Such good Karma is rare.
At L.A. Trade Tech Mr. Earnest had to wear a suit and tie. He wasn’t really supposed to get down in the mud with us and play, being the respected leader. We had two guys in the class who were perennial screw-ups, couldn’t do anything right. One day Ray went charging out the door holding a full, open quart of Bright Red (of course) and had a head-on collision with Ernie coming in the door. Soaked every piece of clothing Ernie had on, and none of it got on Ray...
We had a bucket in the paint mixing room where we dumped all the sludge. For some reason it was at the edge of a middle shelf. Toward the end of each semester the bucket was just about at the overflow mark. One of the gals in the class was reaching for something on a lower shelf when Pete The Plumber came to make a deposit in the bucket and knocked the whole thing upside down on her head. Then, I must admit, he did the one good thing in his life; he dragged her straight to the nurse’s office and got her fixed up.
We had mostly Dana paints in the class. We also had one quart of One Shot Lettering White to last us all semester so we were instructed NOT to use it for making panels. I, of course, intended to do that very thing; paint a large grey panel using the One Shot and as soon as I opened it I dropped it upside down on the floor. It fell EXACTLY upside down and didn’t spill a drop, but I couldn’t touch it without losing the whole quart. I had to do some sort of magic act before Ernie caught me -- I think I was able to save about two thirds of it.
One time I was just about broke when I got a job requiring a lot of Medium Orange, and it was in an upscale neighborhood. So, for the first time in twenty years, I sprang for a brand new pair of Levis and a whole quart of One Shot Orange. While opening the quart I spilled the entire contents in my lap, and all over the sidewalk in front of this store. Si Allen tops this one by doing it with shorts on and turps in the paint. Ha. I wore those orange Levis until they couldn’t be worn anymore.
A buddy of mine was doing a small job on a wall, that was up fairly high, and he was doing it off an extension ladder. He had a gallon of Bright Red in one hand and leaning out to catch the last bit of the sign when he lost his balance. Later, he said he had nothing else to hang onto so he held the gallon of paint all the way to the sidewalk, which he met head first. When he woke up the now empty can was on his chest and red stuff was everywhere, the cops and paramedics were all around and there was a dead body tape outline around him. He wouldn’t let them take him in the ambulance for fear he’d never see his truck and equipment again, so they wrapped up his head and he drove to the hospital. It took weeks for his concussion to heal.
Lenny bought a new truck once. A Toyota long bed stake with mahogany bed and rails and we were threatened with dire results if any paint ever got onto his beautiful new truck. The first day he put five gallons of white in the bed, with the lid loose, and it tipped over leaving the driveway of the shop. He left a white trail for miles -- which led right to the shop. He had a thing for five gallons of white; once he went to repaint the backboard at a car dealership. In their infinite wisdom they’d had the lot resurfaced and THEN called Lenny to repaint the sign cautioning him not to get any paint on the new blacktop. Have you ever watched Laurel & Hardy or the Three Stooges? Five gallons upside down from the plank to the blacktop.
I worked for a place once that had a mini truck with a utility box on it where they kept all the shop’s paint. One of the guys took the truck out to a job one morning, but he came jogging back later in the afternoon. The truck stalled on the freeway and he couldn’t get all the way over to the shoulder so he left it in the painted island wedge of an onramp, where nobody is supposed to drive. We all piled into another vehicle and went up there to push the truck over to the side, but when we got there there WAS no truck. But there WAS an enormous rainbow of colors splattered from the wedge to the center divider and all down the freeway. Somebody getting on had T-Boned the truck, rolled it over and pushed it all the way to the middle. Every can of paint opened and spilled. When the cops got there they found the mess, two vehicles but only one driver. They picked up the big stuff off the road and left the mystery to the next guys (us) to figure out.