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Retrace your steps>Articles > Jack Knife
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Early one morning in February 2007, I was returning to my depot at Iver Buckinghamshire in a Mercedes Benz Axor
2543 6x2 tractor unit coupled to a TNT tri- axle curtain semi trailer, it was still dark and was very cold, the
temperature gauge in the cab was reading minus 1 degree Celsius, I turned left at the roundabout at the end of Wood
Lane into Langley Park Road heading towards Iver Village and up ahead, near Wingroves farm I could see a small van
on my side of the road, I began to slow down and position myself to drive around the vehicle, as I got nearer I
could see some people walking about in the road so I just touched the brake lightly in order to slow myself down a
bit more and found myself in a skidding on some ice and hurtling towards the farm gate and a car that was in the
gateway, I felt a bump as I mounted the kerb another bump and crashing sound as I mowed down the farm gate and
another crash and bump as I hit the blue car that was in the gateway, I then came to a stop and was a bit
dazed but I quickly applied the hand brake checked myself over and luckily I was ok. Then the door of the cab was
flung open and some people were asking if I was ok and I asked them if they were ok to which they replied yes and I
asked them if they were in the car that I had crashed into and they told me that they had skidded on the ice and
had crashed in to the kerb near the farm gate and had punctured their nearside tyre and damaged the wheel and were
in the process of getting the spare wheel from the boot of their car when they had seen me sliding towards them and
had jumped out of the way. I had a walk round to their car and saw it was badly damaged and I then noticed another
car in the hedgerow opposite that had also skidded on the ice in another separate incident. My call to the depot
was answered by Lee, who did not believe me at first, when I told him that I had crashed and was stuck in a field,
and then he told me that help was on the way as the depot was not more than five minutes away. The van that I had
seen earlier turned out to be a council sub-contractor that had been called out by the council to grit the road as
there had been numerous complaints about the state of the road that morning. About an hour later the farmer came
over and told me that he had opened his curtains and could not believe his eyes, but he offered me a much needed
cup of tea. It is company policy to carry a disposable camera to take pictures in case of accidents, for insurance
purposes, but one of my fellow drivers arrived on the scene as he was on his way home from work and stopped to
offer some help, I said to him I wished that I had my digital camera on me, and he reached in his pocket and pulled
his own digital camera from his pocket, what a stroke of luck I thought and promptly took the photo’s. I was driven
back to my depot just as the recovery truck arrived and a couple of hours later I drove past the scene in my car on
my way home and the recovery were there still trying to recover the rig.
Simon
Source: http://simon-b.org/jack-knife.php
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 Simon
Yes my dinner was burning lol
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  In a hurry to get home were we!!!
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