Exciting work day

I headed out on a double delivery today - taking two homes' orders. A couple minutes on the road and I found traffic at a dead stop at the intersection of I43 North and Manitowoc Road. A couple cars were pulled off the side, everyone else stopped in their lanes, even a couple cars in the intersection itself.

Suddenly, I saw this dark little blur, a Terrier, bolt between cars and someone quickly cut between the blur and the lane of oncoming traffic to herd it back to the side of the road. So I stepped out of my car to see if I could help. About six of us were circling the dog, trying to trap it between us. As we talked to each other, I found out none of us owned it. Apparently, the dog had jumped out of her car as it turned onto the highway and the owner hadn't noticed.

So this poor little thing was scared absolutely to death. Snarling, shaking, snapping and most of all, trying to get away from us. One of the guys even had a bag of Doritos he was trying to lure the dog over with. But no luck. Eventually she found a spot under an SUV that none of us seemed to be able to reach. There she sat.

I knelt next to the vehicle and slowly inched my hand toward her, pausing when she snarled at it and starting again as she calmed down. Eventually I was touching her paws, then her shoulder, then I grabbed her collar. Wow. You'd have thought I put a cattle prod to her. Yelping, snarling, biting, struggling. It was rough pulling out from under the SUV and my hand was half covered in blood by the time I had her in my arms. As soon as I had her in a hug though, she calmed down like nothing had happened.

She had on tags with a phone number. Her name was Zoe. Someone called the owners, took the dog so I could wash off my hand. Dorito guy had a first aid kit, gave me a band aid. A policeman pulled up about that time. He made sure there was no accident, no one injured, asked if either of the two of us who had been bitten wanted to file a report. No, I didn't want to file a report. The poor little thing was just scared to death. The only thing filing a report would do is drive up the owner's home insurance rates.

So I delivered the pizza's, got back to work. We had a manager trainee in today. "Way to go, new guy," said our store manager, "Now trainee here has an extra hour of paper work to fill out. Next time just run the dog over."

I think he was kidding. Kind of.