Getting Into the Game!

Some call it “The Scavenge Scramble”. Others call it “you snooze, you lose”. We call it “Getting into the Game”.

It started several months ago when a storm had knocked down a couple of nice trees near my parent’s farm. On the opposite side of the road, but close enough that I felt that the spoils were within the “Forrence domain”. And I’d ride out and gather the loot in the next couple of days. Well, my downstream neighbor Dave is recently retired, yet still in his mid to late 50s. So he is young (relatively), heats with wood, has time on his hands, and is on the prowl. And he beat me to it.

As we walked out to get the mail this past Friday, a pickup with trailer rolled by. The cargo was three nice sized logs. Then Dave drove up, rolled down his window, pointed at the receding trailer and said “How do you like my find?” “There’s all kinds of stuff up there” as he gestured up the road. County work crews had been making noise all day – the sounds of chain saws and backhoes echoing up and down the mountain. And now we BOTH knew what that meant. And he had a head start. Game on!

One of the benefits of running your own business is that you can set your own priorities. The morning was spent configuring the best way to route a large customer’s inbound and outbound call traffic over a variety of TDM and IP trunks. So, a Friday afternoon with mid-winter temps in the 40s, and deciduous road-kill available for the taking, ranks fairly high on the priority list. Fire up the tractor.

There is really only one rule - you can’t take wood from in front another “wood burner’s” property. Fortunately, we all know who we are.

I know that it sounds like something a bunch of hillbillies would do - poaching roadside lumber after every wind storm. Dave is retired after a career of managing the voice and data infrastructure at the Nation Fire Academy. And I spend my days providing voice, data and video design and support for customers from coast to coast. But maybe we are hillbillies. Anyone who saw me with a company van two weeks ago would have surely wondered. They would have said to themselves, “…the van says ‘Voice, Data & Video Distribution Solutions’ – why are they driving up the road with a twenty foot log chained to the trailer hitch…” Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because I’m in the game!

Recent haul