I was bumming around in the old pickup the other day with my buddy Joe. It was our plan for the day to go check out a cave over in Giles county but since we’re both TimeBankers and since we really were just bumming around we decided to go have a look at the most recent request. Apparently the child of a fellow TimeBanker had been pushing his swing as high as he could with no one on it, much to the chagrin of his mother. She had said multiple times, “if you keep doing that you are going to get your swing stuck in the tree” and, lo and behold, there was the swing waiting for us caught on a dead branch.

Our fellow TimeBanker made us aware of the events leading up to this point including the fact that both she and her son had yanked on the rope with all their might to see if they could break the twig holding the swing up but to no avail.

Something you need to know about my buddy Joe is that his personal ethos is that nine times out of ten the answer to a problem is to hit it harder. If something isn’t working it is his M.O. to pick up something, usually a metallic object, and beat the tar out of it until it falls back in line. Now when you combine this with his considerable knowledge of vector geometry you have a truly dangerous force and in this case it was my opinion that the swing stood little chance of staying in the tree.

As expected, Joe took one look at the swing and started to pull on the rope. The difference in his method from previously tried methods was that he applied his strength and weight at an angle to where the swing was stuck in the tree. At first he was unsuccessful but as it turned out our combined weight of something near 380 lbs was enough to cause the swing to become unattached from the tree. I would love to describe to you how this happened but it was a rather violent occurrence and as such I was much more interested in taking steps to not end up face down in the mud and, thus, did not get the play by play on how the swing became separate from the tree branch.

Our fellow TimeBanker was appropriately thankful and we went about our merry way to the rest of the day’s adventures.