Season's End

Today was the last day of our regular tourist season of 2014. I arrived at work early in order to turn on some of the outside lights in our auxiliary parking lot. After escorting a lovely family to the lot (the path to the lot was a little dark, and mom wanted someone to walk with them, preferably bearing a light), I was able to lock the gates to the auxiliary lot, and they shall remain locked until April. When I got back to the visitors' center, I locked the doors and, after bidding a happy Thanskgiving, merry Christmas, and a happy New Year to the departing sales clerk, went down to the basement to shut off the water for the drinking fountain outside our front door. Things got real quiet all of a sudden, and so they shall remain until the spring.

There was one wrinkle, however. The Manager on Duty for the day discovered that his office door, the door that had never been locked for all of his sixteen years with the organization, was locked and that he didn't have the key. To compound matters, his personal keys (car and house) and his wallet were locked in the office. Furthermore, the key box for the building is, you got it, in the locked room. After making a few calls, he got in touch with one of the guys in our maintenance department, who told him that he had an old master key (all of the locks were changed a year and a half ago) which could possibly work. The maintenance guy was working at another site about eight miles north of my principle site, so I drove the M.O.D. up to get the old key, which thankfully worked, necessitating a call to a locksmith.

While it was a pain in the ass, things turned out well in the end, so this little kerfuffle will be something we joke about in the future. It's always the minor-but-majorly-annoying events that end up as the funniest anecdotes.

Now, my job enters the "cushy" part of the "cushy, except when it's not" phase, and cushy it'll remain but for bitter cold snaps and other beastly weather events. I'm cool with that, I think I've earned the peace and quiet.