My boss quit smoking 2 months ago and I really thought it was great! I had wished I could join him, but I hadn’t! We were down at New Ulm working with another crew and we had just finished our jobs. It was Thursday morning, and everyone was in the hotel having breakfast. I had finished and was outside drinking coffee! I was looking in the boss’s briefcase for a pento fill out form when I moved some papers and lo and behold, I found some cigarettes.

 I kind of smiled as I now knew, he hadn’t really quit (I took back the credit I had given him),

I walked around a bit finishing my coffee when I spotted a small tin about the size of a quarter. It had been driven over and the cover was flat. I was pretty sure I knew what it was before I picked it up! I picked the cover off with a jackknife and just as I thought it was a box of cigarette loads! Only these were a little larger because these were cigar loads!!! I hadn’t seen these in years, but they were common in the 60’s and 70’s. You could buy them in novelty shops. They put the meaning in “SMOKING CAN BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.” Especially because if you smoked non-filter cigarettes you might light the wrong end! But? Don didn’t. Well, you might say I was grinning a little again as I went over to the boss’s briefcase and carefully put them in 5 of his 7 cigarettes! He smoked filter cigs, so I was pretty sure he would light the right end!

We loaded both trucks up and headed to the Twin Cities and half way there we pulled in to a wayside rest area. We had coffee and used the restroom, a concrete structure, and I had informed the other fellows what I had found that morning. Well the boss was the last to use the restroom and we were outside by the trucks when all of a sudden we heard a powerful BOOM! 

So, when he came out someone asked him what the noise was. He answered he didn’t know. 

Another person asked, “DID YOU HAVE GAS?”

All he said was, “LET’S GET GOING!”

We journeyed on to our office in Maplewood and everyone went in the building but Don. We couldn’t see him, but we could see his feet under the truck. He was sitting on the bumper, then we saw smoke drifting from behind the pickup. And then? BOOM!

One fellow went outside and asked Don, “WHAT WAS THAT NOISE?”

He answered, “I JUST TRIED TO BLOW MYSELF UP!”

That fellow then asked him “I thought you quit smoking?” 

He replied “NO!”

Don and I went home by ourselves the rest of the way and on our journey he asked me, “Did you load my cigs?”

I said, “Yes, I found the loads in the parking lot of the hotel” and I told him I had found his cigs shortly before that!

He asked me, “How many more are going to blow up?”

I told him, “None” but he found them and gave them back to me! 

I think Don liked having me around, it kept him on his toes.