When Your Future Hangs in the Balance
Imagine your most valuable investment besides your home, hovering over what as near as makes no difference – the void.
The void. The empty space below two borrowed forklifts and a stranger whose name you don’t even know.
Yesterday was a masterclass lesson in overcoming fear, the kindness of others, and belief in that little thing called fate.
The stage leading up to this moment had a lot of stairs to climb. Almost exactly three years ago we bought our first hobby CNC to make not reptile enclosures, but PC parts.
The computer parts didn’t happen and we left our consistent careers working maybe 50 hrs a week to start a little garage business we eventually named Focus Cubed Habitats.
As Stephen and I quickly learned, those wonderfully short 50-hour work weeks were as much a part of the past as our childhood safety blankets.
Fast forward to the week that will go down in history not only because of this moment pictured but for what others had to offer to make it all happen.
Now for the meat and potatoes. Our new CNC showed up not only a month early of the estimated delivery (late December, early January 2023), it showed up a day earlier than the scheduled delivery day of Friday.
You know what else happened to be scheduled for the new CNC delivery day of Thursday? The beginning out our extensive home repair process. I’ll leave the lovely details of this saga for another time, but imagine foundation, plumbing, drywall, and broken appliances all in one.
Family stepped up to help babysit the workers at the house. Ok, one panic attack down. That left the question of HOW to get the ever-approaching 4800lb CNC machine off the trailer. All forklift rentals were booked. We reached out to a neighbor we’d seen with a forklift. Sure enough, he was willing to let us use his. Problem? We didn’t know the fork size or the weight. Cool. But, we didn’t have any other option other than to believe it would work. We didn’t sleep Wednesday night.
Thursday morning dawned bright and sunny. The neighbor’s 8000lb forklift was indeed heavy enough to lift the load, but she had 4-foot forks. We needed 6-8ft ones to reach under the behemoth of a CNC machine. Insert expletive here. In a pinch, we knew we had some 6ft fork extensions collecting dust in a corner. Time to dust those puppies off.
We worked through the day machining, assembling, and shipping orders until a delivery driver wandered in the shop at 2 pm. Right on time, “I have your machine. Where do you want me to park?”
We lay eyes on the shipment for the first time and all blood drained from our faces. It was HUGE. Stephen silently gets in the forklift to approach the mountain sitting on the trailer. There’s no way….
The very sweet driver unchained the beast, removed the snow packing, and motioned for us to unload it.
Once positioned, lifting began. Then immediately stopped. The fork extensions fit perfectly on the other side, nice and stable. But, the gantry centered on the machine stuck out so far that the load was too far out towards the tips of the extensions. As Stephen lifted they bowed, the machine hovered on three corners, but the fourth remained seated on the trailer.
No go. There was no way we were going to risk any more. What now? Our backup plan was to call a wrecker with a boom crane or rollback, but that would take a few hours for them to arrive. The nice, tired driver looked at us resigned to his fate of not getting any sleep that day.
In a last-ditch idea I left Stephen and the driver standing in the road and ran down the block to another business I thought I’d seen a forklift months earlier.
I arrived at their front door looking like a prey animal, wide-eyed and wiry, “Hi. Strange question. Do you have a forklift??”
The men looked at me quizzically, “Not a weird question. We get asked all the time. And yes, we do, come look!”
I chanted in my head, “Please have longer forks, please have longer forks, please….”
The door opened, and a gleaming new forklift sat looking shiny. Four. Foot. Forks.
Damn. I explained to the guys what was going on and that we were their crazy neighbors at the end of the row trying to unload a CNC that didn’t want to budge.
“What if you used… two forklifts? One on each side. Would that work?” one of the men asked.
I looked at them and not so quietly shrieked, “Brilliant idea!”
The next couple of hours had our hearts in our throats and tears streaming down my face. Stephen and the unnamed man lifted our future off the trailer as I directed the patient driver to pull the trailer out at the right moment.
Then, ever so slowly, the dance began. It isn’t so difficult to understand the mechanics of the process. Lift CNC, pull out the trailer, lower CNC onto ground. The reality of the amount of trust we had to place on others and the emotion of the situation was crushing.
In a tense minute, our CNC gently lowered on cool, firm, lovely concrete. We all let out a whoop in celebration. Yes, Stephen and me, the unnamed man, and the kind driver all celebrated the moment of teamwork.
As we all unpacked the shipment to check for damage since now we were bonded as a team, I learned the driver’s son was going to school to be a CNC operator and this was a big moment for him to see such a machine, and Justin, the unnamed man, had been wanting to get a CNC to work on his side woodworking hobby. A small world full of amazing people and stories.
Our journey is woven into these posts, videos, and most importantly, intertwined with your own story. Indeed, your faith, support, and encouragement have helped create something more than simply just a reptile enclosure manufacturing small business. Like the helpful stranger on the forklift and the kind delivery driver, we’re working together with you to lift the reptile-keeping world to new heights.
