Many years ago I worked as a tow truck operator for a local Greensboro company that serviced AAA (American Automobile Association) members. A common occurrence on calls in Greensboro's well-to-do neighborhoods was being called to tow a car that was parked at the end of a long winding driveway too small for the tow truck to pass through and usually around the corner of the house.
The obvious solution is to push the car to the tow truck but you can almost always bet the required direction is uphill and being one man and two tons of luxury car try as I might that wasn't going to happen. Of course, the AAA member would insist I call my boss for more help which my boss would be glad to send but AAA refused to pay for extra help, my boss didn't think it fair to make him pay for the extra help when we were already working at less than 1/3 of our retail rates and of course the member refused to pay extra.
If the customer was a woman they sometimes agreed to pay for more help but if the customer was a man or if the customer called her husband the subject of the winch ultimately came up. Not it's not that I didn't want to use the winch. AAA would pay extra for winching and being on straight commission I was all about anything I could charge extra for doing. The problem with winches is that a steel winch cable will literally saw through most anything it rubs against in the course of pulling a few thousand pounds of Irving Park luxury car up a grade. That includes the corner of a house-- even masonry houses.
But has been the story of my life, nobody listens to Billy-- especially the "movers and shakers" in Irving Park, Sedgefield and other such neighborhoods. So after trying to explain to them why it won't work I hook up the winch cable and start winching the car up the driveway while watching the wife's eyes grow bigger. Ultimately, a house full of big, strong teenage boys capable of pushing the car all the way to the dealership pushes the car to the wrecker while the wife chews out the husband for being such an pig headed jerk.
And of course they never tip after having wasted hours of my time.
I bring this up because these are the same people who run Greensboro with the same my way or the highway attitudes. Because they're crooks they think everyone else is. Any idea they didn't come up with on their own isn't good enough. Anyone who disagrees with them is a "naysayer" or a "troll." They suppress the ideas of others and force us to suffer in silence or go to extremes to be heard, to have the voice they promised we'd have when they took control of our city. Well I don't know about the rest of Greensboro but I've had enough of suffering in silence, I say it's time the trolls were heard. After all, it's the trolls who bear the burdens and do the work, why shouldn't we be heard?
So when you visit your nice friends in the nicer neighborhoods and see the strange horizontal cuts in the outside corners of their houses...
Become a part of Real Progress For Greensboro (There is no cost, never will be.) and join us on October 29th for the first Gathering of The Trolls where the media, the Mayor and the City Council will be in attendance to hear a real economic development plan that helps the poor and the working class and not just a few pig headed Irving Park developers.
But if Irving Park residents get behind it then they could get a permanent grocery store in Golden Gate using my very same model and they won't even need me to do it.
