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I get to work at the usual time. Here comes Tom, a half an hour early, zooming into the parking lot and practically beating me to the door.
"I want you to know what happened," he says as he opens the door.
The carpet in the office is soaked. There is a standing puddle of water right in front of my computer. I hear water running."
"Oh sh**, he didn't get it turned off," Tom says, and runs out the back way.
I follow. The trucks are parked in the garage section of the building as usual--but the bathroom, which was in a corner, has been demolished.
"Andy ran into the bathroom with the truck last night," Tom explains as he comes out of the wreckage. "His foot slipped off the clutch."
Yeah, and must've slipped onto the gas. I turn to look at the front of the shop truck. One small ding. From the way the truck is parked, there is no way he could have avoided hitting the outside wall before he hit the bathroom.
"He reparked it," Tom explained. I still can't figure out how he could have aimed the truck to do the damage.
But a closer look shows that he mainly hit the mini refrigerator, which pushed (and destroyed) the cabinet, which in turn pushed in the bathroom wall-apparently the builder hadn't heard that you are supposed to anchor walls to the floor. The wall caved in on the sink, which crashed into the toilet, breaking it into pieces. The sink is intact, which I find rather extraordinary. The light bulb is broken, the metal trash can now resembles modern art, and every magazine in the rack is soggy and ruined, as is the toilet paper.
"You have called the boss?" I asked.
"Oh no, not yet. Andy will call him this morning."
"And how am I supposed to work with a puddle of water in front of the computer?"
"Use the shop vac to suck it up."
The shop vac sucks up a tiny amount of water from the carpet, but since the concrete floor slopes downhill, more water seeps in. I can't move the files and bookcases.
Andy comes in, calls the boss, who takes things calmly, to my shock. I get to work-it's payroll, 941 time, schedules to write up, phones to answer. And in between, trying to suck up more water with a shop vac that is now leaking. I take it apart-hardly any water in the catch bag.
Andy wanders in. "We're gonna look to see if someone has a toilet to give away," he said. "Tom and I are gonna fix things tomorrow on our day off."
"Well, you need to do something about the water in here. I've used paper towels to try and keep my feet dry."
"My cousin can bring in a carpet shampooer. That'll work better than the vac."
I wait. I go mail letters. I deliver contracts. I read DU. I try to pretend that my feet aren't freezing.
Then, about an hour before the end of my day, here comes the boss, bringing 4 days' worth of letters. He won't let me put a mailbox up at the office, and is too cheap to get a box at the post office. He glances at the destruction (Tom is back working on it, and later I find that Andy has snuck away from work to do things, too), says nothing, and leaves. Two minutes later he calls ME to tell the two of them to get back to work. You guessed it, he's that kind of boss. The shampooer finally comes. I'm up to my ears in paperwork that has to get done TODAY. I use the shampooer while the computer is backing up files. I tell Andy, who again comes wandering in, that the bathroom and the office had better be habitable on Monday.
So how was YOUR Friday?
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