Desk jockey vs. common sense
At the time this happened, I was a 33 year old woman working with a bunch of mostly misogynistic middle-aged men. This happened in 1985 (I know, I know, I’m old).
I was working for the USDA Forest Service in the Rocky Mountains as an engineering technician designing logging roads and supervising a few surveying crews surveying in said roads. But part of my job, as was all FS employees, was to fight forest fires during the summer fire season wherever they needed us. This fire happened on the District next to ours, so I was familiar with most of the roads since I liked to go four-wheeling on weekends, Instead of digging line as normal, I was assigned in the communications room manning the radios, taking requests for resupplying equipment as needed, and any other various jobs. These jobs were rotated to give a person break from sitting at a desk for twelve hours.
One day, instead of a helicopter dropping lunches to the line crews way up the nearest mountain, someone decided that a truck could make the trek up to deliver the lunches to them on an old dirt-track road. I was chosen for the job. For some reason, some higher-up from the Regional Office decided he wanted to go along to see what was happening up close. Now, in my regular job, I was used to traveling on a lot of back country roads, (been doing it for nine years) so I was very comfortable and skillful on most roads. He had me drive, since I was familiar with these roads, and hadn’t been sitting on my backside in the Regional Office.
A mile or so up the mountain, the road started getting narrower and narrower, until, it was basically just two tracks in the side of this steep mountain. I told my passenger that I was getting a little nervous because there was nowhere to turn around to go back down. He said to keep going, and, basically being my boss, I did. Until the road got so narrow and with boulders too large to go over there was no way to keep going. I was NOT looking forward to backing down this narrow road two miles, but knew I could. He insisted I turn around right there - ON THIS NARROW DIRT TRACK! I tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted. Now, when turning around with a steep mountain on one side, and a dropoff on the other, you always point the front end toward the dropoff and the back end toward the mountain. I knew it would take a lot of mini turns and time to maneuver the pickup around, but again, was confidant I could do it.
In about the middle of all the turnings, (with the front end pointing out) the guy insisted that I could move just a “little” bit farther forward. Again, this is some big, high muckety-muck who could make or break my career. So (internally rolling my eyes) I inched it forward, with the truck tipping just slightly down the mt. But when I tried to put it in reverse, we didn’t move because I didn’t have enough weight in the bed of the truck to get any traction. I just turned and stared at him. At least he had the decency to look a little sheepish. We ended up having to call on the radio for another truck to pull us out, and a helicopter had to deliver other lunches to the fire crews, albeit late.
When the fire superintendent later asked me what happened, I told him the truth. He told me I should’ve trusted my original instincts, but didn’t totally blame me. From what I understand, the desk jockey wasn’t allowed to “visit” any more fires.