Work Stories: Episode 47: The Leaning Pole of Not Piza

Previously on Work Stories, I told all of you about the time that I burned my finger while changing a light.  That was a painful memory to write about, mostly because it hurt physically when I did it.  It hurt a lot.  The time I spent with my burned hand was not a fun time.  I’ll try and make this week’s Work Story a little bit more fun than that one.

This is another museum story.  I have a lot of them.  I still work at the museum, so I’m constantly gaining potential stories to write for the bunch of you.  This one is from some time last year.  I forget exactly when it happened, but I know it was about a year ago.

I had a daytime shift at work.  It’s not something that I usually get.  I’m lucky to get one every two weeks.  I’m usually put on the nighttime shifts, working well into the dark.  It’s something that I have grown accustomed to.  I wake up around noon, fart around my house for a while, go into work at four or five, depending on what the schedule says.  That’s my routine.  The day that this story takes place was different.  I got to work in the daylight.  I got to leave work at the time that I was used to arriving at work.  I got to arrive at work at eleven in the morning.

When I arrived at work on that fateful morning, the sidewalk had been taped off.  It was taped off for construction, not for a crime.  Don’t worry.  Nobody died at my workplace.  There was construction being done on the street right outside of the museum.  This was odd because we hadn’t been told about any construction being done that day.  Nobody informed us of that.  There was a reason, however.  The construction was unexpected.  It was immediately needed.

My coworker looked at me as I walked in.  There was a look of confusion on my face, and she understood that I was trying to figure out why there was construction work being done.  She decided to tell me about the events that had unfolded before I showed up for work that day.

There is no parking lot near our building or the buildings around us, so any delivery vehicles have to park on the street.  Usually they park in the one street-side parking spot directly in front of the museum, in order to not block up traffic.  That morning, a UPS truck had shown up and parked in that spot.  In order to make their delivery easier, they backed the rear end of their truck over the sidewalk at the end of the parking space.  Then they backed up a little bit more.  Finally, they backed up another foot or so and hit the lamp post immediately behind them.

A normal person would have thought “Oh I hit a lamp post.  I should pull ahead.”  Nope.  That’s not what happened.  The driver of the UPS truck backed up even more.  This yanked the lamp post out of the ground and tilted it on an angle over the sidewalk.  That was when the driver got out of the truck.

I don’t quite remember the exact details of what happened after this, aside from the driver completing his delivery, and driving away, claiming that the pole had always been tilted that way and he wasn’t at fault.  My coworker took down his license plate number and called the city workers to tell them what had happened.  By the time I showed up for work, the pole was being repaired.

That’s all I have for this week’s Work Story.  A hit and run that a UPS driver had with a lamp post.  That’s a little bit more fun than burning my hand, no?  I think it is.  I hope you enjoyed reading this.  I have about three minutes to get it up and have today still be Friday.  So that’s it.  I’ll come back next week with more.

Until then, I love lamp.