That one time when @Coby Fleener helped me move stuff at work

There’s a lot of well-deserved noise to be made about the uselessness of social media. It’s vain, it’s stupid, it’s a vortex of trolls…these are true, but they aren’t absolutes, as there are a great many uses for things like Twitter and Instagram (screw Facebook though), and one of them came clear to me this morning at work.

Now, probably 42% of everyone I follow on the above platforms are members of the Indianapolis Colts. One in particular is star tight end Coby Fleener, #80, out of Stanford University. Coby has been posting a lot lately about how tight ends have to be the most athletic players in the NFL, because they catch, they block, they run, they do it all. (Coby also has biceps the size of Christmas hams, and occasionally the Norse god Thor has warned him that his hair is getting a little long, but I digress.)

Well, today I had to put fork extenders on a huge Taylor tractor while I was working in the yard. The extenders were each about ten feet long, tubular, a foot wide, made of half-inch thick steel. They are heavy. They weigh all the pounds. I can’t give you an exact number, but it’s bad.

Normally they’re on the ground where I can just stab the forks into them from the comfort of the driver’s seat, but today someone parked a bunch of trailers in front of them, and the only way to get them out without running to the other side of the yard, getting a truck, and making a chaotic time-consuming mess of it, was to pull them through the dirt, by hand, by myself.

I did it. And it sucked. And I got really, really winded, like I haven’t in years. I’m only 30, and I run regularly, and I get plenty of exercise at home and at my job, so I’m not out of shape, these things are just beastly heavy. And I kept thinking man, if only I were an athletic monster, this would be a lot easier.

And it was during the drag of the second freakishly heavy extender that I, for reasons unknown to me, heard Coby Fleener shouting in my ear, like he was reading the text of his own Instagram post, “TIGHT ENDS ARE THE MOST VERSATILE ATHLETES IN PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL.” I imagined him pumping 100-lb barbells as he said it. His hair probably grew three more inches in the process.

None of this makes much sense to me because I have never A) been a tight end, B) played any real football, and/or C), been an employee of the NFL. Nevertheless, it was Coby Fleener’s ghost spewing Champion Stuff into my ear that got me to drag that extender the last ten feet (forty in all) so that I could put it on the forklift and offload the truck that had been waiting for me this whole time.

Look, I’m not saying there will always be a justification for some of the stuff I follow on social media, but in this case, tight end Coby Fleener had my back.

Go Colts.