snow day–an absolutely true story

Yesterday, when I went to work, my boss was late. So I waited outside the locked gate to our shop.

I parked my wimpy four-cylinder car when he arrived in his big white truck and grabbed my coveralls and backpack. Still groggy from shoveling snow until eleven the night before, I put my backpack down next to his truck and slung my patched-up coveralls next to the bed.

He soon found out that his van door wouldn’t open, a fact he contributed to the snow and ice encrusting everything. He tried a variety of methods, but didn’t get anywhere. After perusing both my car and his truck for a lighter (to no avail), he decided to go back in the shop for a blow-torch. To heat his key. To open the frozen van. He left, muttering about how it was his birthday and all. Poor guy.

Meanwhile, I decided to be the conscientious employee that I am, and began wiping snow off the windows and doors, the ice shattering into cobwebs underneath my hand.

Then I heard yelling from the other side of the van.

“Rocky! NO!!”

Damn. Rocky was the resident doberman, stinky and at least as heavy as myself. He was probably eating my lunch. Oh well. There went that tuna sandwich Kirsten had woken up at six in the morning to make me.

I rounded the corner of the van just as my boss was running up, blowtorch in one hand, keys rattling in the other.

I stood there. Dumbfounded.

Rocky had stuck his nose in the partially-unzipped top of my backpack. Sniffed. And then took aim.

He emptied at least five gallons in my backpack. And over it.

Directly in through the opening. Arching up and in, a perfect stream of canine yellow.

Turned out, my boss had been using the wrong key (a fact he discovered after gingerly using the blowtorch on the other key for several minutes).

And then we went to the job site and had to truck all of our supplies up the snowy driveway by foot. And then had to run the same supplies out, when we decided to call off the job due to the threat of an unethical employer.

And then the next job had a business class from the university come tour their labyrinth of a clothing store–thus annulling our chances for employment that day.

So we took our boss out to lunch. And watched the Austrian cooks terrorize Asian tourists with sock puppets and sauerkrat (the latter of which later went on to terrorize my own intestines for the next twenty-four hours).

Then I went home.