Wednesday July 6th, 2016

The exercise:

Write about: the malfunction.

Had a pretty long lineup at the door when I opened up at the bakery this morning. The shop was basically full up for the next 45 minutes or so, maybe longer (I didn't exactly have time to check the clock). Wasn't much left by the time the initial rush subsided.

Then the second rush arrived.

The bakery is a very popular place, I will say that. Deservedly so, too. Glad there were two of us up front for the whole morning.

In other job news, I got a call to work the 9 to 5 shift at the community center this Saturday so I'll be doing that. We were already discussing skipping the market (both because the forecast was calling for rain and because we don't have much to offer right now) and that phone call sealed things for me.

This afternoon I stopped by the library to pick up a book for Kat and grabbed a few books for Max while I was there. When he saw them he was very excited. And then he asked me if I worked at the library today.

I think I might have too many jobs.

Mine:

"Is this working properly?"

"If you have to ask... probably not."

"That's... not a very reassuring answer."

"I'm not paid to reassure. I'm paid to fix things. I'm a repairman, that's what I'm trained to do."

"Well, you could do a little stretching beyond your very specific job description."

"Or I could just fix your busted junk."

"This is not junk!"

"Could have fooled me. Anyway, do you want me to fix it or not?"

"Well... I don't know if it's supposed to be doing this or not. I've lost the instruction manual, you see."

"... I'm pretty sure your electric toothbrush shouldn't be shooting out sparks like that."

"But what if it's a special model? Or a one of a kind edition? Wouldn't it be worth more as is?"

"Whatever, man. It's your mouth."

2 comments:

Greg said...

That's a busy morning indeed! Did you have many disappointed customers? It does sound like the bakery has a well-deserved reputation though :) Good luck at the community centre, I hope that is less rushed for you! And you totally should have told Max that you don't work at the library, you stole the books instead ;-)
Hah, your repairman is a great character. His calm in the face of what's clearly an unreasonable idiot of a customer is inspiring, and I totally appreciate how he could decide to leave the customer with his malfunctioning toothbrush in the end. The sparks sound like they might electroclean your teeth though!

The malfunction
The voice on the other end of the phone was calm and a pleasant tenor, but Jabbieh couldn't tell if it was supposed to be male or female. He supposed it didn't really matter, but when he answered calls he liked to form an image of the person he was talking to. This time he drew a blank; all he had was a white glowing space in his mind.
"We're the weather bureau," he said, wondering if the person was listening. "We predict the weather and provide warnings to people who might be adversely affected by it."
"Yes, but the weather is malfunctioning at the moment."
Jabbieh paused, unsure if this was a practical joke. The voice on the phone seemed to calm and self-assured really.
"And what can I do about that?" he asked eventually, wondering if he was being rude.
"No, you see, I wanted to tell you that your predictions will be wrong unless you make some adjustments. You need to halve all of your theta values when calculating for Monday, and ignore the sigmas when doing Thursday."
"Thank-you," said Jabbieh. It was a prank call.
"And it's about to start hurricaning over Florida," said the voice. "Please check."
Jabbieh hung up. Moments later it rang again.
"Weather bureau," he said, sighing as he picked up.
"Jabbieh? How the hell did we miss a hurricane over Florida?"

Marc said...

Greg - the disappointment levels vary. So far most people have said they'd just come in earlier next time. A few people do come pretty close to storming out :P

Thanks! Yeah, I like this guy too. I'll have to bring him around for a few more visits.

That's a rather unsettling phone call. I'm not sure I'd answer the phone for the rest of the day after that one!