A classic...
Sometimes the oldest insults, the ones everyone knows, really do end up working the best.

I was in college at the time at a forestry school in the northern Adirondack Mountains. As part of one of the classes, we were assisting in building a ropes course- one of those things that they send management teams through to foster team building and all that shit, with the trapeze and the zip line and all that stuff- and we were trying to build it out of tamarack and other rot-resistant woods. Since the college owns thousands of acres of woodlands, they had no shortage of raw materials, and with hundreds of forestry students they had no shortage of manpower.

The only problem is that tamarack- also known as larch- is a swamp tree, which means that once you cut the log down there was no way to bring a machine in there to drag it out because it would just sink into the mire. We also had draft horses, but even they couldn't drag it out.

You see where this is going, don't you?

Twenty one students and a teacher were sent out with hand loggers to retrieve a forty foot log from the swamp. To give you an idea of what a hand logger is:



Take this peavy pole, take the end hook off of it, and stick two of them together, end to end. You now have a long handle with two hooks in the middle. Put this on the log, kick the hooks into the bark, and two people lift on the handle.

So we got out there with a load of these damn things and carry them into the swamp on a very cool fall morning. We went trudging through the muck to the log, which had already been dropped and the branches cut off, and started putting the hand loggers on this thing to carry it out. As we did so, the teacher- a very large, burly woman named Cathy- noticed one of the guys standing to one side with a hand logger, looking confused. She barked at him, "Where's your partner?"

"I don't know..."

Cathy looked around with a murderous gleam in her eye and sized us all up, then roared, "POLLY!"

One of the few girls in the class reluctantly stepped out from behind a tree.

"Polly, get over here!"

"But I hurt my back playing soccer!" Polly whined.

"Well my back hurts too, but I'm here, aren't I? Get over here!"

"But my back really hurts!"

Cathy gave up in disgust, and we all picked up the log and began carrying it out to the road. One guy went up to his knee in a mud hole, all of us sunk in to our ankles, and it was not a very pleasant little task. We muscled it out of the swamp and up the embankment to the road, and were carrying it along the road to a spot where a truck could get to it, when Polly appeared alongside us with a cigarette in hand. "Hey, does anyone have a match?"

Yes, I gave the proper response. Loudly. At the top of my lungs, in fact.

Cathy was the first one to crack up, but only by a tenth of a second. The log crashed to the ground, everyone stood with their hands on their knees and tears of laughter rolling down their faces, and Polly chased me back into the swamp for a couple of minutes before I outmaneuvered her by hiding behind Cathy.

People were congratulating me on that all over campus for weeks.

(I feel compelled to add here that this story is not made up, exaggerated or otherwise distorted in the slightest. It really did happen that way, and those really were their names. So if you're reading this, Polly- well, you're famous now! Enjoy!)
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Thu 4 Oct 2007, 15:47, Reply)