A mistake you only make once

Wednesday, August 20, 2008 |

So here's a short little story for all of you that brightened my day and made me laugh until I cried.


Tonight I volunteered as I usually do on Wednesday nights. In the place I volunteeer there are many many many lockers available to store your stuff. The locker numbers are also completely and totally out of order. Not sure how it happened, but it's so bad there's almost no point to having a locker number. Each locker is supposed to have one hanger in it in case someone needs to hang stuff. There are also stalls to change your clothes.

This is not the actual locker room, just an example of a much smaller one.....Imagine what you would do to check that each locker had a hanger in it?

Often people grab the hangers to use them and then don't remember to put them back in the lockers at the end of the night, so one of the jobs you may do as a volunteer is to go to all the stalls and put the hangers back into the lockers that are empty. You walk by, open all the lockers, check for a hanger, if it needs one, you leave it open, then you go back and replace a hanger in all the open lockers after you clean the stalls. It takes like 2 minutes.

Tada. That is all the backstory you need.

So tonight someone relatively new(aren't you glad I am keeping you anonymous?) was given the task and told to make sure each locker had a hanger. It was also CRAZY busy. Insane amounts of people there using the lockers. IE- like half of them were missing keys and still locked. Our Friend started her task by checking the lockers and she thought to herself....if I leave a locker open, someone might walk by and close it(why they would do this... I don't know) ....so I better just lock all of the lockers without hangers and take their keys with me. Our friend then walked up to me with a pile of like 40 keys and was super proud that she had figured out which lockers needed hangers.

And now she had a pile of 40 keys and no way of finding the completely out of order lockers.


Being a super sensitive person, I laughed myself silly and then made her wait till a few more people could see her insane pile o' keys and then we spent the next while (with more helpers) matching back all of the keys to the lockers and Our Friend would hand us a hanger to use as we found them. We assumed they were from the stalls. She then proceeded to the stalls to clean them out.........where she picked up a ton of hangers which now had no homes because she had gotten new ones out from storage for the lockers. Seriously. It killed me. Then for the rest of the evening you could tell who had heard the story by who looked like they had cried recently.
Friend......Have I mentioned that I heart you deeply??

5 comments:

WhiteEyebrows said...

Wow... I will make sure to return my hangar to the locker. I never thought about that.

Gabby said...

Pile o' keys! Wow, how funny. I hope she can laugh at herself....

RYC: Thanks for your comment and your prayers. Brian and I really need them right now. Still unsure what to do, but I THINK I'm getting a better understanding... maybe. I think. Perhaps. *hugs*

Alison said...

Oh, this sounds like something I would do, although I didn't do it. I'm encouraged to know that someone as clueless as I am is out there as well. I feel for you "Our Friend". :)

Molly said...

Oh my heck! (nice Mormon exclamation moment there)

Rhia Jean said...

That is too great. How did I miss that?