At times it was a struggle for Troubleshootin’ Tom (TST) to keep his personal life on track, and his financial condition was a continuous struggle as well
Troubleshooter had an uncanny knack for knowing when faked ignorance was the best policy and to just let circumstances take their appropriate course
Some of his past business deals hadn’t been completely kosher and had finally caught up with him. There were remnants from a few of those sour deals that prevented him from having a bank account.
The lack of a bank account never mattered, for a number of years, until he started to make humongous cash while working in Inuvik. Finding places to store all that cash was becoming a problem. Naturally, he made the same shoot-from-the-hip decision he had made so many times in the past: he went to the bank and ordered a stack of thousand-dollar bills.
I was probably the only person who knew that there were many portraits of Canada’s seventh prime minister inside his bulging right-hand shirt pocket.
The man definitely was his own worst enemy and it still baffles me how he could straighten out other people’s problems with ease but that when it came to his own situation, all bets were off. Over the years, I saw him come up with solutions to problems that qualified people claimed were impossible.
One such situation happened in the spring of 1999 when the Yukon government surprised the oil industry in Inuvik by putting weight restrictions on the North Klondike Highway, earlier than expected. With some difficulty, the oil company managed to get their rig transported south—except for one large heavy piece of equipment.
A trucking specialist was flown to Inuvik to find a way to get the last piece out. The specialist said he could put extra wheels under the load until the cows came home but it still wouldn’t meet the weight restrictions.
The oil company was in a jam and the rent bill meter would keep ticking for months. Luckily for them, there was an overweight, Copenhagen-packin’ trucking specialist with the answer—TST.
Memorized between his ears were the trucking regulations for Alberta, B.C. and the Yukon. He used to say, “It’s my job to know such things.”
I received a call from Troubleshooter, telling me he was sending me some cash to purchase a particular trailer, sitting in Whitehorse, that he planned to use to haul the load south. The next night there was a knock on my door and I was handed an envelope. Inside were seven crisp $1,000 bills.
I never got the opportunity to see Tom when he passed through Whitehorse with his “special” load, but I was told that it was an ugly-looking sight as it headed toward Edmonton. He told me later that he had to endure a barrage of colourful barbs on the radio from passing truckers. Ugly or not, he had the satisfaction of knowing that his load was completely legal at every weigh scale along the way.
Troubleshooter also had an uncanny knack for knowing when faked ignorance was the best policy and to just let circumstances take their appropriate course.
His predicament began when a mining company rented his trailer to haul some equipment out to the Livingston mining area, east of Whitehorse, and then they promptly went broke.
He was in a pickle. Heavy equipment would be needed to access the remote site, to retrieve his trailer and get it back to Whitehorse. He started to search for another solution that would be easier on the pocketbook.
After sifting through the local scuttlebutt, for some time, the solution became crystal clear … Just wait for the court to get involved. Tom had observed enough government behaviour over the years to know that you just had to have patience, because bureaucracy was like a super tanker—slow to get moving, but nearly impossible to stop.
Sure enough, the court eventually ordered the sheriff to seize all of the company’s equipment at the mine site. Just as Tom suspected, the gung-ho sheriff didn’t conduct proper due diligence and stickered every piece of equipment on the site.
So far, the process was moving at a snail’s pace, but it was staying on track, following Tom’s imagined script that had been bouncing around in his noggin for some time.
The final piece of the puzzle fell into place when the sheriff hired a contractor to haul all the equipment into Whitehorse so it could be sold at auction. It almost seemed as if the system had inadvertently become Tom’s puppet—every step executed like a maestro’s performance.
A green Ford pickup circled the sheriff’s compound daily until the prized possession arrived.
The sheriff resembled a sputtering Model T when Tom asked him why his trailer was in the compound. It took a moment or two for the court’s representative to recover, with a bit of bluster, but in the end, reason prevailed. The pouting sheriff had to hand over the trailer free of charge when Tom produced documents of ownership.
I’m sure the systems representative will go to his grave never realizing that he had played the starring role in the chubby maestro’s imagination.
Even though there are enough Troubleshooter stories to cause a paper shortage, I only have space for one more.
Tom loved to pull stunts where he got the last laugh (even to the point of humiliation), but there were a few times when the tables were turned.
He had an indolent ulcer near his ankle, around an inch in size. It was open, refused to heal, and at times it was extremely painful. Almost everything had been tried to get it to heal, so he was desperate to hear any new suggestions that came along.
We all know that when you’re open to suggestions about anything medical, there’s usually a quack ready to fill the bill. The table-turning quack who came to the rescue was a construction worker with a convincing, smooth tongue.
There’s no doubt that an intelligent fella like Troubleshooter was desperate. Most of us cringe at the thought of almost any substance coming in contact with an open wound. The table-turning quack coaxed Troubleshooter to apply a thick layer of extra-strength RUB.A535.
Ouuuch!
