Friday, February 22, 2008

Some Things are Hard to Avoid

Have you ever experienced an incident that you wish never happened, something that was embarassing, lacked judgement, and something that you could go back in time to fix? Well such an incident happened within the past few days at work. Now before I get into the details, no, I did not go off the deep end and murder a bunch of my co-workers (which seems to happen more and more frequently these days). In fact, it's something so minor in comparison that many of you will probably think it's no big deal. Well, it's a fairly big deal to me, particularly if I've done it twice now within the past three months. The thing that I did was; I lost my keys!!

Now these aren't your ordinary keys. I have different lockers located within the plant at work that include important tools, gear, and other essentials that I need from time to time. My dad and I share one such cabinet where I need to access daily to retrieve my wireless radio, flashlight, and toolbelt. In total I think I might have about 5 different cabinets/lockers at the mine (and I really don't need them all, really). But I guess it's one of those things where the more you have, the better off you feel. About three months ago (I'm guessing how long ago it was), I lost the set to all of my lockers/cabinets. And now, two nights ago, I lost the latest set of keys. Needless to say, my dad was not very happy to hear that I had lost them AGAIN (he had to arrange to get new locks for two of the cabinets we share). I used this key caddy that had a nylon string and doesn't really hold up for very long because the string wears out particulary fast. They have the metalic string key caddies, but I didn't find it necessary to change it out the one I had. Boy, was I wrong.

These kind of things tend to go in phases for me. I used to have all sorts of problems with my old 1990 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight car in which I'd either drain the battery or lock the keys out of my car on countless occasions. I would either accidentally leave the headlights on my car and forget to turn them off once I got out (the beeper that alerted you that your lights were still on when you turned the engine off never worked - which certainly didn't help my cause) or I'd forget to bring my car keys along with me (due to my mind being elsewhere) and when I'd go to lock all the doors, my keys would be stuck inside. I never did have the handy keyless remote lock/unlock option with that car and boy, I really could've used it. I remember one such incident where I locked the keys inside the car while it was still running during one of my trips home! So there the car sat running until my uncle came over to get the vehicle opened up, but not without using up a bunch of gas in the process. That was the time where my parents had just bought a new computer and I guess my mind was on putting that thing together and using it for the first time. I've only had one such unfortunate incident with my current car, where I locked the keys inside the vehicle while it was still running at work. Thankfully my dad happened to be there (I was just getting off midnight shift). So I had my brother-in-law call a tow-truck to help me out. That bill ended up being $30, but it was money well spent.

So tonight I went out and bought some new locks for work (locks that all use the same key so I can eliminate some keys) and a new key carrying device. I am hoping there will never be another incident of losing my keys for a very long time to come. Having to replace every single lock gets very old quite fast!


UPDATE!!! I am happy to announce that I ended up finding my keys at work after all! So I didn't end up replacing all of the locks that I had dreaded doing. I still used the new locks I bought that just used the one key - so that still came in handy. But the happy ending to this story is that I found those keys that I thought were burried in a big pile of dirt in the messy basement of an iron ore mine.

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