The Dead Chicken Caper!

I worked for a tire company for about eight years when I was younger and the business had three owners, Darrell who inherited the business from his father and he let two other two men buy into it with the stipulation that they did most of the work as he had other things he wanted to do. Sometimes things were a little slow and the owners and the crew would play jokes on each other when they were bored, boys will be boys sometimes no matter how old they get to be. Roy lived a little bit out in the country and had chickens on his place that his wife kept for the eggs. Randy used to be a high profile salesman for a large tire company before he left to become part owner of the place I worked at and because of his “always a salesman” personality he got to go do the public relations type activities for the company so he drove around a lot in a big high profile four wheel drive truck with a flashy paint job, he was kind of a peacock and liked to be noticed. One morning Roy came in to work and told those of us who were already in the office that he had a dead chicken in the back of his truck that he wondered if anyone wanted to use it for crab bait, Darrell was an avid fisherman and crabber and so were several of the employees. No one had any immediate trips planned and then the phone rang and one of our customers from a big car lot called and asked to have Randy come over and pick up a trade in they needed to have some new tires and some brake work done on before they could resell it, the company made well over half of its money by doing business with the used car lots and they also sold the used tires they took off of the car lot cars and sold them to people who couldn’t afford new tires. About then Randy pulled up and came into the office. While he was having a cup of coffee and being told which car lot wanted him to go pick up the used car one of the employees went out front to where his truck was parked and took a piece of rope and tied it around the dead chicken’s neck that was in the back of Roy’s truck and tied it to Randy’s truck’s trailer hitch and threw the chicken under the truck knowing that Randy wouldn’t be walking around the back of it when he left to go get the used car to bring back. As soon as Randy walked out the door Mark told everyone what he had done so we all rushed to the store window to watch Randy pull out with the dead chicken flopping along behind the truck and we all started laughing as the car lot he was going to pick up was all way across town and the best route to take to it was to go right through the college campus slowly, of course Randy usually liked that part since he got to look at the cute girls on campus and smile and wave at them. We were all imagining what a jerk they were going to think he was dragging that dead chicken behind his truck and they would have no way of knowing that it had started out dead or that Randy didn’t know it was back there. Roy even went so far as to call the car dealership Randy was headed to so the employees there could also enjoy watching Randy drive up dragging the dead chicken. Then we all had to wait to find out how much humor we could derive from the silly stunt. About an hour later the car lot manager called up Roy and told him that when Randy drove into the car lot there was not much of the chicken left on the rope but he told Roy that they were all lined up at the window and started clapping as soon as Randy pulled up and got out of his truck. He said Randy then walked to the back of his pickup and saw what was left of the chicken tied there and flipped them off. We of course couldn’t wait for Randy to get back so we could find out how the girls on campus reacted to his driving through there with a dead chicken tied to the back. Randy came back in about half an hour and when he drove in no one said anything we all just kept on working. Randy waited a little bit and then asked who had tied the rope to his trailer hitch. Then everyone started laughing and so did he and he then proceeded to tell us that he started getting suspicious when he was driving through campus and instead of generally being ignored like usual everyone was staring at him and he said at first he thought they were waving at him and then he figured out that a few people were pointing towards the back of his truck but of course when he looked in the rear view mirror he couldn’t see anything since it was on the ground. He said after he drove through campus he was suspicious so he stopped by the side of the road and looked back real quick but only saw what looked like a piece of rope so he just got back in the truck and went on the car lot that was only about a couple of miles away.  He said he wasn’t entirely sure what had been originally tied to the rope because there was pretty much nothing there by the time he had driven twenty miles but he did figure it didn’t start out as just a rope. He laughed as he realized what it must have looked like when it was bouncing on the road behind his truck and why the girls had such strange looks on their faces. It was not the last prank ever pulled there but possibly one of the ones that was talked about the most. Idle minds can be a dangerous thing.