After reading all these great stories of “Less than Smart Things You’ve done to a Car,” I was reminded of this idiot that was stationed in my Air Force Unit back in the early 1980s. The Air Force will move your household goods (weight limits apply by rank…) when you had a Permanent Change of Station (PCS).
The Air Force started a program a few years earlier called “Do It Yourself” (DITY) Move. This program is based on the service member moving their own household goods (furniture, washer, dryer, cloths, beds etc…) and they would receive a portion of the moving expense, based on the weight. After packing up your stuff, you would get the truck or trailer weighed and after delivering the furniture to your new home, house, or apartment, you would then get the truck or trailer weighed again and the difference was your shipping weight and you would be paid accordingly. The big advantage here was if you let the Air Force move you and you went over your allotted weight limit, you would have to pay the AF the difference. If you went over your weight limit during a DITY move, you would receive the max allotment for your rank, but no penalty for going over the weight limit.
So, now that I have laid out the basis for this story. It should make more sense…
A married Staff Sergeant (E-5) in my unit was PCSing and decided to do a DITY move. He and his wife really had little more than a sofa, bed, a chair, and not much more… He was authorized 9,000 pounds and he estimated that his stuff came to less than 1,000 pounds. Then he and his buddies brain stormed and he decides to rent a large U-haul truck and put his car in the back and get paid for the shipping weight of his car. Back then, the U-Haul trucks had humps in the back where the wheel-wells were.
To get his car loaded, he built wooden ramps to drive his car over the wheel-well humps. He drove to a loading dock, backed the truck up and drove his car up onto the ramp. He then starts driving his car into the truck and his front wheels easily roll over the wooden ramps he built. What he did not consider was that as his front wheels passed over the hump and rolled back to the floor of the truck, his car high-sided on the humps and his front wheels just hung dangling over the front of the humps. Now he was stuck, no matter how fast he spun his rear tires in drive or reverse, he was hung up with the rear of his car outside the truck.
He then drives off, with his car hanging off the back of U-Haul looking for help. He does not get far, the local police pull him over, they will not let him drive the truck like that, they contact the base security police (SP), the SPs notify the First Sergeant, the unit Commander, and a whole bunch of other folk. It soon becomes evident that he is trying to cheat the DITY system and defraud the Air Force…
It did not go well for him. He received an Article 15 (a type of punishment that is like a “misdemeanor” verses a “felony”), he lost a stripe, and lost the PCS move… How do I know all this, I and the whole squadron had to sit through a very long presentation by this individual (part of his punishment) and then it was followed by a briefing given by a Lawyer from the Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Office. Our Commander was furious; he was humiliated, and constantly reminded about this by his peers. And that was probably the longest Commander’s Call I ever had to sit through…