Work Stories: Episode 46: The Light Bulb Incident

Previously in the Work Stories I told you about that time a few weeks ago now, where a guy got some nice, big, hard slaps across the face.  I was shocked.  He was shocked.  His friend was shocked.  A memory was implanted in my mind and I shared it.  That’s what the Work Stories are, at heart.  They are memories I have from working.  I share them with you and let you get to learn about things I’ve experienced.

This week, I’m going to share another experience that I’ve had at work.  It was just as painful, if not more, because it hurt me.  This is a story that involved my own lack of intelligence when it comes to something that is plain common sense.  I failed to notice what I should have noticed, and suffered consequences for it.  It hurt.

Part of my duties at the museum that I work at is to man the cash register.  I’ve written about this part of the job before.  Many of the experiences I have at the museum include me watching from the ticket booth.  Well, this one isn’t watching.  This one is about something I did in the ticket booth.  It’s not a bad thing that I did.  I wasn’t being inappropriate at work.  It’s simply a mistake that I made, and one that I regret having made.  If I could relive that moment, I would not do what I did.

Our ticket booth is lit by a series of lights on the ceiling.  They shine down upon the desk and illuminate everything so that we can see what we need to see.  The tickets?  We can see them.  The paperwork?  The lights help with that.  Cleaning?  Sure.  You can clean better if you can see what you are cleaning.  These lights help with everything in the ticket booth.

A duty that I took on through my time working at the museum is changing lights.  I’m one of two people who does it on a regular basis, and the other person is no longer full time.  I go around, looking for lights that are out, and swap the bulbs for new ones.  It’s like changing any lights, except these bulbs are slightly different.  Anyway, that’s what I’ve come to do at the museum.  I am the light changing guy.

Back to the ticket booth.  There was a light that was slowly going out, day by day.  One day it would fade to a duller shine, the next day even dimmer.  Eventually it got to a point where I said to myself “Screw it.  I’m changing this light.”  That was my mistake.  Right there is where there was the big flaw in my plan.  I never should have changed that light when I did.  It was a rookie mistake that taught me never to do that again.

I went and got a light bulb.  I pulled the fixture out of the ceiling.  Then I went to unplug the light bulb that was in there, which was really dull.  I didn’t think about what the consequences of this action would be.  The light may have been dull, but it wasn’t completely out.  When I went to pull the bulb out of the socket, I burned my hand.  I burned it pretty bad.  It wasn’t a hospitalizing burn, but it made three large burn blisters on my hand and rendered that hand basically useless for a week or two.  The pain throbbed through my hand for a few days before finally dissipating.

This would normally be the end of the Work Story.  I burned myself, the end.  But it’s not.  There’s a little bit more to it.  The night that I burned my hand was the same night that we got a large shipment of balloons and material related to the balloons.  This might not sound like such a big deal, but imagine taking the 30 or so boxes upstairs and putting them in the storage room while your hand is throbbing with burn pain.  That’s exactly what I did.  Sure, I was injured.  I wasn’t going to let that stop me from doing the work that needed to be done.  I was going to get those boxes into the storage room.  I would fight through the pain and do it.  And I did do it.

I’m going to end it right there.  Not because that’s a good ending or anything.  I probably could have written it better.  But it is the end of the story.  I hurt myself, then fought through the pain to do my job.  Exciting, right?  That’s the Work Story for this week.  I’ll see you next week for another installment about another thing that happened to me while I was at work.

Until then, let’s cancel an apocalypse.

P.S. I know it’s a day late.  I was sick yesterday, and halfway through writing, it got really bad.  I postponed it for one day because of that.  Sorry for the delay.