the repairman

I've gotta start off by saying that life has been pretty busy lately. Summer is winding down and school is starting back up. I used to be effected by these types of changes. Now, the only thing that effects me about school starting up is that I will be slowed down by a couple of school buses on my normal route to work. Hopefully, not making me late.

This week at work, we discovered that the drawer we send out for lane one in the drive thru wasn't working properly. When smarter, more mechanical people than I went outside to find out what the problem was, they discovered that a few of our lovely customers had tossed pens underneath the motorized tray. There were at least seven of our pens stuck in there.

Needless to say, the tray was fried, and a repairman was called in to fix it.

Now I, being the lucky person I am, was working the drive thru when the repairman came to fix lane one. When I returned from my lunch break, I was immediately aware that the said repairman was there. My working space is pretty small to begin with, but when you add both TV monitors (used for unimpaired visual to lane two) on my counter, plus the rotund repairman in close working space -- I was cramped!



I tried my best to run transactions for lane two (lane one being closed while it was being fixed), and didn't do too bad of a job at it either. I only felt like my arms were as short as a T Rex's because of my limited space to move in.

Now normally when I talk to the person in lane two there is a screen where I can see the customer and they can see me, and we have a real face to face time. But with the monitors out of their normal terrain and scrunched all up in my space, the screens were not as they should be.

So for most of the day, everyone in lane two was talking to the invisible man. (Or woman in this case. But hey, how could they tell? All they could see of me was my right shoulder.)

There was a point when I tried to fix the monitor so that I wouldn't scare the people away. (I could just imagine all the customers I had helped that day going home and telling stories to their families about the headless teller at the bank.) The repairman was underneath the counter and not paying any attention to the squished teller, so I saw my chance! I reached over to adjust the monitor to face me, but I didn't realize that it was connected to the other monitor sitting next to it. They both decided to go for a plunge directly onto the repairman, who was lying on his back in a typical plumber position under the counter!

Yeah, they were both aiming for his unprotected head. The company should really supply those yellow hard hats for their employees. (Have they never heard the word "lawsuit" before?!)

I quickly saved his life by stopping the heavy equipment's mad dash at murder, and then gracefully acted like nothing happened.

I can be pretty good at making an innocent face with the proper motivation.

All this being said, the drawer to lane one was eventually fixed, and the repairman lived to tell about it. I, on the other hand, will always be scarred with the thought that I was almost responsible for the death (or at least a lifelong paralysis) of a repairman whom I hardly know.

the end.