Some things, you just can’t make up. I try for my posts to have at least some learning value – that someone can take one little thing that I’ve written and think, Oh, I could do that differently.
Well, not this one. It’s just pure lunacy. So enjoy!
This is the story of the medication, the key and the …just read on
This was some years ago, at a residential program. A woman had worked the 4:00 pm – midnight shift. It was midnight and she was getting ready to go home. So far so good.
She had left her things, including some medication that she needed, in a locked room. Not really where staff were supposed to leave their personal items, but not a big deal.
Now, there was never anyone working alone in that program. There were always two or three staff members on duty. Each one of the staff was issued a master key, allowing them to get into any locked room at the facility. Remember this, it’s important.
The previous day, this staff member had broken her master key. Broken meaning that it was now in two pieces. She didn’t remember (or chose not to say) how, exactly, she had broken it. She had not bothered to mention it to me or anyone else who might have been helpful in, say, giving her a new key. Instead, she just spent the day with the broken key in her pocket.
So now it’s midnight and she is ready to go home. I get it, her shift is over and she’s tired. But she has to get her stuff, which is locked in a room. She has a master key but, of course, it’s broken.
As I mentioned earlier, all staff had a master key. She wasn’t the only one in the building and she wasn’t the only one with a key. So, you’re saying, she just borrowed someone else’s key, this story isn’t interesting at all.
WRONG!
Rather than take the couple minutes it would have required to get someone else’s key she… wait for it… asked one of the residents (a teenage girl) for some crazy glue and glued her key together. No, I didn’t make this up. I never have to make anything up. I have thirty years’ worth of crazy stories. But I digress…
So guess what happened when she used the crazy-glued key in the lock? It worked perfectly… No, then I never would have heard the story. Of course it broke in the lock. What else could possibly have happened?
So now she’s at a crossroads. She can realize that what she did was idiotic, confer with the other staff members on site and, if they didn’t have anything important locked in the room, confess and offer to pay for damages the next morning.
That would be pretty much the only way to end this appropriately. Maybe she could have made it funny, chiding herself for being so stupid, chalking it up to fatigue. I would have laughed along with her.
But NO!
She called me at midnight (I was probably still up, I usually am, but still), not just to let me know what had happened, but to tell me that I was obligated to call a locksmith that minute because she needed her medication.
Leave a comment and let me know how you would have reacted.
