Pepsi Anyone?

You might be asking yourself why on earth I am showing you a case of Diet Pepsi-Cola bottles?  It's been awhile since I've told one of my stories and since it is so grey and drab right now, I thought I'd share this funny story with all of you to bring a bit of humor to your day or evening.

A Case of Diet Pepsi-Colas Back In The Day
Source via ~ http://www.popscreen.com

Many years ago, husband worked for Pepsi-Cola delivering drinks.  Back then, Pepsi's came in both 10 oz and 16 oz bottles.  I'm going back to about 1971 now so don't quote me on this. He had a sales delivery route all his own and he would have to unload drinks according to how many cases they placed their orders for.

His truck had bins on both sides of the truck where they loaded the drinks and sliding doors had to be tied down before he left the shop so the cases of drinks wouldn't fall out. He hadn't been working for them for much more than a couple of weeks when what I'm about to tell you happened.

He had just left the warehouse to start his day and was turning into one of the busiest roads that at the time crossed over a major intersection that brought most out of town travelers through the city.  As he was turning left through this intersection he looked into his right side mirror as he always did on a turn only to see all of his doors open on that side and hundreds of cases of drinks in those lovely glass bottles slowly falling out of those side bins onto the middle of the intersection...seven bins! He told me later that he was beside himself and used a colorful expletive that he had learned in the Marines and can't be repeated here but there was no way to correct the motion of the truck to pull the cases back into the trailer, it was a done deal!  Glass and Pepsi-Cola was everywhere.  He had to pull his truck over, call the office and have someone bring him a push broom and several barrels to deposit the glass and pieces of wood from the cases so that he could clean up all the glass that had shattered.  What a mess!!  Not only was traffic backed-up but he spent quite a lot of time on the clean-up.  His boss, the route manager, laughed and called him a "star", a name that stuck with him for the next year and half that he worked there. He also told him that because he was new to the job he didn't have to pay for the drinks (every driver had done this once when they were relatively new and the trauma of it prevented them from ever doing it again, they double checked all of their doors before leaving the warehouse for ever after!) or we probably would not have had a paycheck that week!  HA

The funniest part of this was I wouldn't have known anything about it since I had just had my first child who was a newborn at the time and I was at home.  But a girlfriend called and told me that she was on her way to work when she saw a Pepsi truck that had lost all of the drinks on the truck.  I asked her where did that happen and she said in the intersection of Highway 41 and Diamond Avenue.  I said "how horrible".   She asked if I had talked with K yet this morning?  I said no and she proceeded to tell me that she thought it was him who she saw cleaning up all the glass.  I felt so bad for him.  He called me later that morning to see how things were going and I told him I had already heard about what happened.  He said it was the biggest mess!  HA

The most important lesson he learned from this experience was NEVER FORGET TO TIE YOUR BINS DOWN!  We laugh about this now but at the time it wasn't anything to laugh about!

So, anyone feel like having a Pepsi? :)