Scott Hollifield

Our forklift, used for unloading pallets of newspapers and inserts, is almost always referred to by the brand name Towmotor, though it wasn't actually made by the good folks at Towmotor Forklifts Corporation of Ohio.

In various e-mails over the years, most about its inability to perform its fork lifting duties at a particular moment, it has been referred to as "tomotor," "toe motor" and "tow mower" but rarely, for some reason, as "forklift."

The newsroom's interaction with the Towmotor and its predecessor, also known as the Towmotor, has been limited mostly to breathing exhaust fumes sucked up through the freight elevator shaft or looking out the second story window and laughing at a phrase written in black marker on a piece of cardboard used to keep the sun off the Towmotor operator's head.

"Look! It says (something I can't put in the newspaper) on top of the Towmotor!"

That limited interaction changed one afternoon.

My phone buzzed. "Something's wrong with the Towmotor."

On the list of work-related phrases I do not want to hear, that ranks somewhere between, "The toilet won't flush" and "There's a guy here with a gun who would like to speak with you."

The newspaper's reluctant Towmotor

While I top the list for clogged toilets and angry, armed individuals, I am not usually the go-to guy forTowmotor trouble unless the go-to guys are gone.

The go-to guys were indeed gone.

"I'll take a look."

A new driver had delivered a couple of pallets of newspaper inserts in a van. On his trip to retrieve the second pallet, the Towmotor stalled in the middle of the alley.

"It won't start," he said.

"Try it again," was the only advice I had.

Click. Click. Click.

I tried to conjure up any corporate Towmotor training I received over the years, but the only seminar I could recall was for sexual harassment and knowing it was inappropriate to call the Towmotor "sweetie pants" did little good in this situation.

I went back upstairs to the newsroom and announced to the assembled staff, which at that moment consisted of three dudes who I was confident had no more knowledge of Towmotors than I did, "If we can't get the Towmotor started, we're going to have to push it out of the way and unload the papers by hand."

In the alley with my crew of journalists-turned-Towmotor troubleshooters, I entertained suggestions for restarting the stationary behemoth before us, the best of which was, "Try it again."

After failing to start it, we disengaged the parking brake and commenced to push.

Towmotors weigh a lot. If I had to guess, I would say a billion pounds.

With much heaving and grunting, we got the Towmotor slowly moving in the right direction, then quickly moving in the right direction and then nearly into another nearby van before someone grabbed the parking brake. We pushed the pallet out into the lot and got the papers into the warehouse. I alerted my superior to what had now become known as "the Towmotor situation" and soon there was a flurry of phone calls and e-mails.

An hour later, I saw John, a Towmotor go-to guy if there ever was one, driving it around the lot.

"How did you start it?" I asked him. "There were four of us down here trying to figure out what was wrong."

"It won't start with the parking brake on," he said, giving me the best three-second corporateTowmotor training I've ever had.

How many journalists does it take to restart a stalled forklift? The world may never know.

• Scott Hollifield is editor/GM of The McDowell News in Marion, NC, where this article ran last week and was spotted by an eager Forkliftaction.com News writer.