Work Stories: Episode 12: Runaway Train

Previously on Work Stories, I described a second-hand story in which a coworker saw two people having sex in their hotel room with the curtains open.  It was not my story, but it was one that I was told.  I thought it would be interesting enough.  This week, I’m going back to a story that happened to me.

This is going to be another story about me dealing with another person’s child because they are too busy doing other stuff than to pay attention to their own kid.  Negligence is something I often see among tourists who come to Niagara Falls on vacation.  Too often, they don’t pay attention to where they are going, the people around them, or what they are doing.  It’s amazing how little intelligence many of them seem to have.  It’s a vacation mentality.  They let their minds run free, but most times they run too free.  This brings me to the actual story.

I’m working at the museum doing my cashier job.  I basically sit in a little booth and wait for people to come up and pay to see the museum.  It’s an easy job that I’ve probably described countless times already.  Actually, this is only the twelfth installment, so you could easily go back and count.  So, I was doing the job again.  Only, this time I had a little more to do.  I had some papers that needed shredding.

When it’s the off-season in a job that depends heavily on tourism, things can get boring.  There are fewer customers, fewer people to watch, and less to do.  The paper shredding actually takes my attention away from how boring the job can be during the off-season.  It makes things a little bit more exciting.  So I will shred away.

I was in the middle of shredding some paper when I hear a noise and see something out of the corner of my eye.  I turn off the paper shredder and look up to see a kid rolling by the window of the booth in his stroller.  Where are his parents?  They’re on the other side of the museum lobby taking pictures.  This is their child, rolling away without them noticing.  Not only that though.  The child is rolling downhill toward a busy street.

Of course I run out of the booth and hurry through the lobby and down the sidewalk to catch this kid.  I’m not letting some innocent toddler roll into the street and get hit by a car.  That’s not going to happen on my watch.  I grab the stroller and turn back up the hill to see the father now running to get his child.  I hand him the stroller and go back to my cash booth.

For the next three or four minutes, while the family is still in the lobby, they wave and say thank you over and over again.  All I could think was “If you were paying more attention to your kid, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place.”  People need to pay more attention to their surroundings.  The tunnel vision that vacationing can create is not a good thing.  This is only one example.

That’s this week’s work story.  It’s a tale of a life and death situation that could have easily been avoided.  I’m not a parent or anything, but I don’t think I’d just leave my toddler sitting around in an unlocked stroller while I go take pictures.  He kid is alright (I think.  I haven’t seen the kid since the incident, of course.), and that story is over.  Come back next time for another thing that happened to me at work.  Until then, cowabunga dudes.