the craziest sight on the road #4

The tow truck had an obvious design flaw: its boom barely extended past its bumper. The chains it was using to tow the car were good at transferring the truck’s accelerating force to the car, but useless for transferring deceleration — when the truck slowed, the chains would go slack, and the car being towed would crunch into the truck’s bumper well before the chains went taught again. That’s why most tow trucks have either long booms or pieces of rigid metal to transfer the truck’s decelerating force to the car.

But metal is expensive here. And people are cheaper. Which gives us the craziest sight on the road #4: two men, each with one foot on the back of the tow truck and the other on the hood of the car. Human pieces of rigid metal, standing on both vehicles as the truck rumbles down the street, centered above the void, employed solely for the ability of their leg muscles to transfer the deceleration of the first vehicle to the second.

These men held the truck’s boom in a death grip. Should the tow truck slow too fast, they had no men standing on THEIR shoulders to keep them from crunching into the tow truck’s cab.