My experience was slightly different. He wasn't wearing red and he had a different vehicle.
*** Shaggy dog story alert ***About a week before the more recent rash of home invasions, I was on my third of three 12-hour night shifts (8 pm to 8 am) in a row. During the afternoon and evening the was an impressive amount of blowing snow. My commute is only about 10 km, but it passes through an open area, and the driveway to my workplace had many small drifts across it. I'm in a Ford Taurus station wagon, so the wind isn't too bad for driving but there was this one final huge drift, and I opted for the ramming speed. I made it through okay and I'm in the parking lot (after the wipers cleared away the snow that flew up over the hood and windshield) and at that point I realized that my Battery Warning light came on and I lost power steering at the same time. This is not good, I thought, but I managed to make it the last hundred feet to a parking space. I went in, and worked my shift. When the security guard's relief showed up at midnight, he got stuck because he had some kind of air dam across the front of his car. Both guards ended up staying the night.
In the morning, the other employees started showing up, and one of them got the front-end loader out and cleared the driveway, so I was able to get out.
Before I started the car up, I checked under the hood and saw that the serpentine belt had come off. Presumably a bit of ice or snow crust got caught in the belt when I rammed the drift, and made it jump off. I was able to get the belt out and run the car long enough to cross the parking lot and drive it into the large heated garage, which also had a number of tools. I found the diagram for the belt installation on a sticker under the hood. It goes around wheels for the crankshaft, the alternator, the AC, the water pump, an idler wheel, and a tensioner wheel. Fine, except there was no hint about how to move the tensioner wheel to let me slip the belt back on. The other guys knew that it should be easy, but could not remember exactly how to do it. I spent 3 hour messing with stuff, bent over the fender, making my back sore, etc. At one point I had to push it forward a few few so that one of the other guys could get out around me with a tracked vehicle that has a bucket lift. Also not good for my back. I eventually realized that this is the sort of thing I should be able to google for, and find on a DIY discussion forum. Which I did. I went back out, found a 1/2 inch wrench and taped it to a extender pipe, turned a bolt on the tensioner wheel
clockwise to give the belt some slack, and finished up in 5 minutes. Then I spent another 15 minutes digging in the wet muddy oily crap looking for a plastic cap that somehow got knocked off of a mysterious tube and went tinkling alongside the engine ... somewhere. I found it under the car, put it on, washed up a bit, and drove home.
By then, it was about 11:30 AM, and I realized that the foot of wet snow on most of my driveway was going to freeze later that night, and I had to scrape it off before it got rock solid. There I am, with a wide scoop (so I don't have to lift much) trying not to hurt my back, while I deal with it. I just wanted to finish up (probably an hour more of moderately strenuous work) and get to bed. I suppose I could have called a commercial snow plow operator, but they would all have been booked up for hours that day, and I didn't want to have to stay up all day in order to pay them after it was done.
All that was the setup, just to give you an idea of the kind of mood I was in.
Then along comes this older guy, maybe in his 60s, riding an old yellow tractor, wearing a faded fluorescent green wool toque. The hat might even have had "John Deere" written on it, possibly indicative of the alleged deer fetish others have mentioned, if it's the same guy. I live sort of on the outskirts of a small town, with many small farms in the area, so passing farm vehicles are not uncommon. More hay wagons on the road than a
Dukes of Hazzard episode. Anyway, he's putt-putting along at about walking speed on the other side of the street. I had never met this guy before, but I nod hello at him because it seemed the neighbourly thing to do.
The next thing I know, he does a U-turn in the street (technically, it's a secondary provincial highway) and drops his front-end loader bucket. I step back, and in two or three minutes, he's got all the snow pushed back, down to the dirt, way better than I could have hoped to do. Then he just waves goodbye, I give him a thumbs-up and a doff of my hat for a thanks, and he heads off up the road again.
That was the best Christmas present I've gotten in many years, a random act of kindness when it was
most appreciated.
