Bill stepped into the lab. We were short staffed, short on hours, and over-packed with patients. We all kept our cool. We had been through worse. It was Saturday. The weather was humid outside. To tip the day even worse, Emma went down.
“What’s the status Doctor Spielman?” Bill asked.
“Not good, sir. We’re in the process of transplanting the belt from Arthur to Emma.”
“And how’s that coming along?”
“Well,” John stepped in, “not good. Nathan said this would be simple, but it’s anything but.”
John rambled on about the problem when from behind the service window, Dana delivered a message. “Dennis, diagnostics is on line one.”
I answered the phone and explained the situation to diagnostics.
They replied, “Yeah, you’re fucked. That’s not easy to fix out in the field. You’ll have to send it for repairs.”
That was work Saturday in a fancy hospital drama style story. One of the belts on our main edger (named Emma) broke. After trying to fix the problem ourselves and failing, we called diagnostics. They told us that that belt was not easy to replace. They were also concerned as to what caused it to brake, so they requested for us to send the machine to them. This all went down Saturday afternoon. Since it’s Memorial Weekend, the earliest we would get a new edger would be Wednesday.
Thankfully, we were able to borrow another store’s edger in the meantime. (Funny side-story, while I first went to this other story to use their machine to run some orders when their lab manager started asking me about my car. I told him. I was confused as this came out of nowhere. Then he explained to me that the regional was on the phone and suggested that I take one of their edgers back to my store.) All day today we played catch up from all of the jobs we didn’t finish yesterday. Here’s hoping we get a new badass high-tech Optronics edger (though I’m not holding my breath).