Joker of the Day

I worked with Jack for a couple of years. We hired him as a maintenance man, but soon found out his talents and abilities were amazingly broad. He could wire an electrical circuit, change a tire on a road tractor and rebuild a pump dispenser in the amount of time it would take anyone else to decide where they were going to eat lunch.
Jack was a huge man…not obese or husky…Jack stood about 6’ 6” and had a size 14 foot; he was just a giant of a man. He was swarthy looking especially when he would let his beard grow out and not get a haircut for awhile. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody and his sheer size would make most people afraid of him. Not that everyone backed away from him. Jack had seen his share of bar fights. When he was several years younger he got into a fight and a guy smacked him across the face with a 2”x4” and knocked most of his teeth out. I can promise you, the guy swinging the lumber got the worse end of the deal.
Behind the toughness, though, Jack was a kind-hearted and generous person and he loved to laugh. One sure way to make him laugh was a good practical joke. One day I stepped out of my office just in time to look down the hall and see Jack roll a lighted firecracker underneath the men’s room door. He didn’t run, he stood there with a huge grin on his face with his hands over his ears. I wondered who in the world was about to be blown off the toilet. All you could hear was, “Oh, Jeesh!....” and the scuffling of feet. Suddenly, there was a blast…at least the initial blast of the firecracker, but then you heard the expletives rolling out of that tiny room louder than any pyrotechnic you could imagine. Next thing I knew, the owner of the company came running out of the restroom still zipping up his pants and he railed on Jack for doing such a stupid thing. Jack stood there enduring the barrage and when the boss was finished, Jack just patted him on the back and said, “have a nice day, Chief.”
There was another time when the boss was away on vacation and Jack contrived an April Fool’s joke to play on the Vice President. Jack called all of the truck drivers on their two-way radios and told some of them to call in sick and some of them to out-and-out “quit” before noon. The Vice President was late getting to the office that morning, so Jack had plenty of time to plot his scam. As soon as the acting boss made it to the office, the dispatcher showed him a stack of orders which had not been filled and proceeded to tell him things were beginning to back up. The first phone call came less than 10 minutes into his morning; a driver called in and said he wasn’t feeling well and was going home. Ok, that’s not so bad…we can just divvy up the rest of his order with the remaining drivers. But then, Jack’s plan began firing on all cylinders. Within 30 minutes the boss had 4 drivers quit and 6 drivers with some kind of illness or another, leaving him with a handful of dispatch orders and no way to deliver.
I was standing in the warehouse talking with Jack and a couple of other fellows when the door burst open and the Vice President stood there with a look of dismay on his face. Almost in a panic he began asking for suggestions and advice. Jack stood quietly, letting the man suffer for several minutes and then put both of his big hands on the boss’ shoulders, looked him square in the eyes and said, “April Fools.” If it weren’t for the rest of us in the room, Jack would have been fired that day.
Still, Jack had a serious side about him as well and I would often find him sitting across the desk from me talking about spiritual matters. Jack had had a triple by-pass surgery about 10 years previously and it seemed like he was preoccupied with dying and constantly worrying about when his heart would give out, but that never slowed the ox down…he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and enjoyed his beer to wind down after work. He could work circles around most of the younger men around him.
Jack respected and trusted me and would talk about things with me he wouldn’t even imagine saying to other guys. It gave me plenty of opportunity to share my faith with him. He would call me Brother Dave and often promised me that he was going to take his family to church.
One day, Jack’s heart did finally give out on him. He was driving his service truck home after a typical day of work. Just a few miles short of his driveway, a massive heart attack took his life; he never even felt the impact when the truck dove off the road and hit a tree.
I don’t know how much good those talks in my office did for Jack, but I do know his death shook up a lot of the other guys around the shop and caused them to wonder about their own mortality and their spiritual status.