asses and elbows

One of my favorite pieces of advice is, “when you see asses and elbows, start running”. Basically, most professional adults will not run away from anything unless it’s an actual emergency. So if you space out or something and you see grown men with big bellies sprinting for the hills, don’t sit there and wonder what’s going on. Get the hell out and then find out what the fuss is about afterward.

This sort of thing doesn’t come up very often, luckily, and I’ve never seen a high-pressure line break loose or a drill rod assembly fall and hit a power line or anything like that. But a good friend of mine did have a genuine “asses and elbows” moment. They were digging some test-pits in a scrubby area, so he was getting his stuff ready. He heard a commotion and saw the operator leap out of the excavator and hit the ground running, so he turned tail and ran himself. The excavator shovel had ripped open a hornets’ nest.