I had no idea where to put this, so it goes here. Why the heck not? I’ve been thinking, in the last couple of weeks, that I really need a new chainsaw. I’ve got a tree to take down in the back yard and, now that I don’t have a chainsaw, I really need one.

So what happened to my old chainsaw? Let me tell you.

Back around the end of 2019 or early 2020, we decided to take down most of the trees in the back yard. They were ugly and we’d been trying to bring them back since we moved into the house in 2016, but they were pretty much dead. They had clearly been abused and unwatered before we bought the house, it was time to start over.

No problem, right? I had a nice 26″ McCullough chainsaw and took down 5 trees and chopped them up. I went to work and was grousing about how much we had to get rid of and how we’d have to rent a dumpster and one of my employees said “Don’t do that, we’ll come and get the wood and use it for firewood!”

Great! So we went around for a while, trying to get our schedules to align and it was finally sometime in mid-February when he and his wife came up, backed their trailer into our back yard (we have nice big gates) and we all just loaded it up. They had to come back for a second load, which turned out to be a couple of weeks later,  because there was so much of it.

The second time, he asked me if he could borrow my chainsaw because he had a couple of trees to take down. I didn’t really need it, he’d done us a huge favor by hauling the wood away anyhow, so I said okay. I packed him up with the saw, bar oil, all the stuff that he’d need and they drove away. He said he’d bring it back to me at work when he was done. This was maybe the first week or so of March, 2020.

Then COVID hit. We were all mostly off for months on end, although we did set it up so a lot of people could work from home remotely. I called him once, maybe in the middle or end of April, to ask how things were going, and he said he was all done, the chainsaw was just sitting there, waiting until he could bring it back. Again, I didn’t need it, so that was fine. I could wait.

Months later, when things opened up again, I went back to the office, expecting him to show up with my chainsaw but he wasn’t there. People were still working remotely so I didn’t think it was a big deal, but after a couple of days, I called him and his cell phone was disconnected. I went to HR and they said they hadn’t had any contact. He’d just vanished.

I waited until the weekend and went to his house and it was empty. They were nowhere to be found. It turned out that they had been renting the house. I talked to the landlord. They had just disappeared. Monday, we called every contact that we had for them and everything was disconnected. We tried to send a letter for a forwarding address and he hadn’t left one.

He’d just disappeared with my chainsaw.

Now I know he didn’t uproot his life just to take my chainsaw. It was just there when he did a runner. To this day, I still have no idea where he went, no one ever contacted us for a reference for a new job, nothing. Just silence.

I was mad about it for a while, but I still didn’t really need the chainsaw. I had bought it when we had acreage and lots of trees and now, we didn’t have a lot of trees anymore. We had one, which is the one that I want to cut down now so we can plant new this spring, but I didn’t feel the need to run out and buy a new one because… why?

I know I can just run down to Home Depot and rent one for a couple of hours. It just bugs me that mine is gone though and part of me wants to just go buy a new one.

Granted, you can’t really get a new original McCollough because they were sold to Husqvarna back in 2008. You can get some with the name on it, but I’ve seen their tools and they just don’t feel the same. I can buy a used one, which I might do, although I really wish I just had mine back. I can even get a modern battery version, which are certainly powerful enough and I know I don’t need a big professional saw because I’ve run out of trees to chop down, but still… I really wish I had mine back. It just bugs me that I have to get a new one when I had one that would last for the rest of my life already.

Yes, I’m just grousing, but it’s my blog, I get to do that. I really hate people sometimes.