Southeastern Mower Campaign

I've been out on a mower cutterbar part recall trip the last ten days. The circumstances and details of the recall would bore just about all of my readers except my dad, but the important thing is that Vermeer is willing to go to the expense of sending out crews to replace critical parts on machines known to be defective instead of waiting until they all blew up during haying season. This hugely impressed dealers and customers alike, some of whom didn't even know we were coming because they hadn't been told about the problem.

I traveled and worked with Ryan Walker, a baler tech. This might seem an odd match, but there are so many of these trips that all the engineering techs, not just the mower tech, were out on at least one mower campaign. We had twenty-one mowers to work on on this trip, in Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Ohio. We also passed through Missouri, Virginia, and West Virginia. Except for two mowers at a dealer in London, Kentucky, all of them were in separate towns, usually at least an hour apart. We were out for ten days, and covered 3630 miles. Ryan asked me if I kept track of such details for posterity, which I do, and I'm curious to see what my yearly totals will be. After nine weeks, I've already driven 6400 miles for work. We worked about 120 hours this trip. Our longest day was 16.5 hours, and on a 14.5 hour day we finished five of the mowers.

There are some odd things to be seen in that end of the world. I've concluded Kentucky is the patron state of horses, tobacca, and looking the other way. At least once every two hours on the road there, we would see something that definitely looked odd, such as a truck meant to haul a car hauling a bulldozer, or an ancient half-ton with three horses loaded into the box in a stock rack, or a skid steer at a dealership being stored six feet in the air on a forklift. After the first few of these occurrences, we'd just look at each other, shake our heads and laugh, and say "oh Kentucky".

Walker pointed out a few barns painted black to me. These were tobacco curing sheds, and the black absorbed light and made them hot inside. They looked shoddily built, but were made with gaps between the slats in the walls to allow air to pass through. I suspect it was to keep with a certain decorative scheme, but many horse barns and outbuildings were also painted black, which to me does not seem terribly wise.

Tennessee also had a rather, ah, backwoodsy feel to it. This feeling was enhanced by the fact our GPS tended to direct us to our destinations via sometimes quite rugged routes. This began to anger us when we found out from the farmers or from our own cruising around that it had been neither the most direct nor the fastest route. The most vivid example of this happened near Newport, when the GPS insisted we take a long, windy, out of the way, one-lane gravel road to a customer's place, even though a decent paved two-lane led almost right up to it. We could just about "hear the banjo". I almost hit a peacock gamboling about, and Ryan mistook an actual turkey gobbling for his turkey ringtone. On the way out of Newport, we were startled by a busload of kids driving out from under a bridge at 5:30pm. What sort of field trip were they out on? We gathered that even in the best of times, the area wasn't very prosperous, and spent no extra time getting out of there.

Tennessee was pretty though, gotta give it that. I hadn't ever been in the Appalachians before, and though they're cute compared to the Rockies, they're worth seeing. On the way out of them, we were about an hour behind a two-semi, one-car accident. There were no fatalities or injuries as far as we could tell, but one of the semis had lost its trailer and dumped a couple hundred bushels of corn on the highway, which looked like a LOT of corn. It only occurred to me later, but I'm sure scores of deer were hit around there for days afterward.

North Carolina was next, and we practically raced through those three mowers spread across the whole state. The last one was in the northeast corner, at a dealer whose son is a baler engineer (oddly familiar). We went for a quick drive to see a customer's place, which was an experience in itself. I've seen some junk piles, but this was orders of magnitude bigger than anything I'd seen, and I mean junk. I spotted some odd gray lumps hanging in a tobacco shed close to their baler. They had attempted to cure a few hams, but just left them when they didn't cure right. Walker wasn't sure how long they'd been hanging, but had seen them at least a year before.

We passed a sign for a place that read "Jim's Cricket Ranch" in this area. The first things that came to mind...in our best Sam Elliot/Virgil Earp voices:
Walker: "Yup, I'm the biggest cricket rancher in the county."
Me: "I'm up to about a quarter billion head of cricket."

Though we were there on a Friday and it was only an hour away, we didn't get to go to the coast. Most dealers close at noon on Saturday and our nearest ones were 500 miles away in Kentucky, so we raced back that way. This was our 16.5 hour day, and I wasn't thrilled about this rather extreme schedule, but we needed to keep knocking out mowers to finish in time to get back for Easter weekend. We got there in time to work on it, but had a panicky moment when we realized we might get set back by having to order parts on Monday. Our schedule luckily worked out anyway though, with the two mowers in Ohio being at customers' places who didn't mind us working on Sunday. The rest were in Kentucky and everything finished fine once our parts came in. Back to Iowa we went after that, and here I am, yet another round of stories collected.

I had schemed about coming home for Easter, but couldn't quite make it work. Hopefully I'll make it back sometime in May.