I thought this only happened to cartoon characters

My butt hurts. Maybe that's because a dog bit it.

No, seriously. The story that informs those statements is no less embarrassing than the statements are. But it is entertaining, so here is is:

It was kind of a lax day for us flaggers, being that my crew chief was only running the brushcutter on dead end roads (no through traffic= no need for a flagger). We brought a Porta-Potty along with us because we were an all-female crew out in the middle of nowhere. We drive them on trailers that attach to the backs of our pickup trucks. Because of the low activity level, I was put in charge of towing the Porta-Potty around. I found a seemingly-safe stretch of road to leave it and went to join my crew.

About two hours later I went back for a bathroom break, but alas, someone had pushed it down a narrow, dead end, downhill, gravel road. With the trailer hitch pointing at the dead end and my truck on the main road behind it. It had to have been pushed, because the tire chocks had been thrown way back into the brush on the side of the road.

As it was blocking the road, I had to go get it. I managed to squeeze the truck past it in order to hook the trailer onto my truck, but that didn't help much. I still needed to back out. With a trailer attached. Uphill. On gravel.

That was clearly not an option, so I decided to turn the trailer around. Given the dimensions of the road, that wasn't a great option either. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Or a ditch and a pile of sand, as it were. There was no way to turn a car, much less a truck, much less one with a trailer attached, around on that road.

The only thing I could think to do was put the trailer on the truck, back up until it jack-knifed, then stop, unhitch the trailer, move the truck around to align with the trailer hitch (no easy task when the shoulder of the road is a ditch), hook it back up, and push again. I had to do that over and over again until I turned the trailer around. Then I had to get the truck on the other side of the Porta-Potty, hook it up, and pull it back up to the asphalt road. St. Jude (patron of lost causes, for my non-Catholic readership) never got so many prayer requests from any one person in one hour (yes, the retrieval of the damn Porta-Potty took a full hour) than he did from me during that interval.

Of course, the whole frustrating and tedious process was interrupted when the woman who lives at the end of the gravel road (she heard the kids who pushed the trailer down the road, by the way) needed to get out to go to the doctor. So I shoved the trailer off to the side of the road (as in, in the ditch. Which meant I had to start the whole process of turning the trailer around over) to let her pass, but that alerted her dog to the ordeal in the road. After she left, the dog stayed behind, alternately chasing my truck and barking at me.

I didn't want to hurt him or back over him, so I did my best to keep his attention at the driver's side window (banging on the side of the door, calling him, etc) while I was driving. But I kept having to jump out of the truck to hitch and unhitch the trailer, which probably made him think I wanted to play. Around the millionth time that I went to work on the trailer, he ran up behind me and bit my ass. Hard.

My reaction was loud enough (I went from a light and breezy "good dog" voice to an extremely sharp "no, no! good dogs don't bite" kind of tone) that he didn't do it again, but it still hurt pretty badly. And I was nowhere near saving my trailer at that point.

It took a lot of patience, many clumsy maneuvers and slips over the side of the road, the accidental flattening of the massive pile of sand (I have no idea why it was there), and countless petitions to St. Jude, but I got out of there. The only real damage was that wheel of the trailer jack was cracked, probably from bouncing down the road.

Oh, and my ass is killing me.