Funny - stupid story, time machine back to 1981. I was living at home with my parents and my neighbor, an older Italian gentleman who only had been in the USA for about 15 years.
Well he cuts down this large oak tree in the center of his yard, but leaves the 4' high stump. So the next spring he and his son dig a hole/pit around this stump, going down about 5 feet. They use an axe (same one they used to cut down the tree) to cut a bunch of the roots, but they still can't manage to get this stump to budge.
So he sees my two cable come-alongs hanging in my father's garage, he asks my father to borrow them, my father hands them over to him. Fast forward to later that afternoon, I come walking up the driveway to see this guy with my two come alongs and some chains wrapped around the top of the stump and the cables of the come-alongs going out and around the base of the power/telephone pole in the corner of his yard. He and his son have pipes on the handles of the come-alongs trying to get that stump to break off.
Needless to say within a few minutes I hear a loud cracking sound and the power/telephone pole falls into his yard. Fortunately no one was electrocuted, so ComEd shows up about a 1/2 hour later and tells the guys that he is paying for the pole and and the labor for them to fix everything. This Italian guy goes nuts and starts blaming me and my father because our come-alongs caused the problem and that we should be charged instead of him. ComEd guy tells, nope you broke you buy it. So a few days later the come-alongs are left on our front porch and they are worthless. Those two goons had stressed them to such a point that their frames collapsed against the spool hubs, there by clamping them into a locked position.
I confronted the idiot old man and he told me to *^&$off, so needless to say we no longer spoke and I advised my father to never loan out any of my tools.
TheGrooveking
