The Keyboard Sloshed at Midnight

For a decade, I worked as a jeweler's apprentice.

But if you asked the jeweler, he'd most likely say that I was more like a glorified secretary. Jill-of-all-trades, if you will. Whether he wanted to teach me the trade or not, I learned a lot about it, interacting with gem traders and wacky rock hounds and even wackier customers. Whom to trust, whom to ignore, and whom to watch your back with.

Case in point: the potential customer who came in clutching the shattered remains of an electronic door key, insisting we fix it before her husband came home from a trip. We do jewelry, lady, not electronics, but she couldn't seem to understand the difference. "You fix things, FIX IT!" We directed her to go to the place where the car was bought. She said it was too expensive, and we only charged twenty dollars for fixing a gold chain, so FIX IT!

Or the time we got visited by the FBI. Do you know that blue topaz is made by irradiating natural (usually clear or brownish) topaz, and the darker the color, the more it's irradiated? And that people try to smuggle uncut chunks of it across the border? And that (we were told) there are two lead-lined safes for the ones they catch, one on each coast? And that they were tracing a shipment that got through, and was broken up, and did a certain person bring in some pieces for my boss to facet? Why yes, they are in the basement as we speak. My boss was never so happy to get rid of gem material, and was rather short with the guy on the phone who brought them in. "Oh, well, everyone else turned me down, so I figured you'd do it. Can I have them back now?" The boss gave him the number of the agent who took them.

Or the time that I walked into work, to a grease-smeared baggie on my desk? Stringing and knotting pearls is one of the most thankless jobs on the planet, and you will learn inventive new curse words (and the order in which they're hissed) that leave hardened blue streaks in the air. If the blue streaks stuck around after a few days, we'd yank them down and make wind chimes out of them. Nondescript smeary baggies are quite suspicious at a jewelry store, with the boss nowhere in sight. I tracked him down. Oh, just a stringing job? You'll knot them later? She was at the movie theater with her husband, she dressed up for it, and the pearls broke in the theater? (???!!!???) Okaaaaayyy..... I opened the bag, and nearly gagged on the stale popcorn-with-gallons-of-butter-flavored-chemical-waste emanating from the opening. I should have grabbed gloves at that moment, but did I? Nooooo. I scooped out... a pile of popcorn, unpopped kernels, and a few pearls. The bleeping bleeps scoured the floor of the theater and didn't sort anything, just dumped it in the bag! And my boss didn't warn me! I found him hiding in the kitchen, which was a convenient place to ream him out as I did some scouring of my own on my hands (oh, lookie, you made a conveniently fresh pot of coffee just for me to abscond with the grounds and scrub my hands raw getting that reek off me before double gloving and going back into the fray, how lovely!) I dumped the contents on a tray swathed in paper towels to sort first, and I muttered what amounts to an incantation against all bleepers who bleeping bleep wear their bleeping high quality pearls with no bleeping knots between them to a bleeping movie theater! I swear I opened up a portal to the nether regions at that moment, but we work in retail, would I know the difference?

Well, I got revenge. While they were legal, my boss bought a bunch of really spiffy dinosaur eggs. He got a baker's rack, and set them up so people could see them all before selecting their preference. And, I Got An Idea. We didn't have cameras on that particular room at the time, so I snuck in a bag of rubber dinosaurs. With some bigger dino plushies in the mix. And I scattered them all over the floor and desk in that room. Then I walked back to his work bench, where he was soldering unsuspectingly. "Boss, we have a problem." That's code for "Look, I just can't explain, please follow me." So he sighed, turned off the torch, and followed. I managed to stay right in front of him till that room's doorway, then slid to the side, and he stopped on the threshold to behold the glory of a veritable plethora of little dinos. I gestured. "They hatched." He was so stunned that he just started picking them up silently, and I thought, "Oops, I overdid it, I'm screwed." I helped him clean them all up. It was never mentioned. Until I heard him a few weeks later, telling a customer, "Yeah, and she'd put all these toy dinosaurs all over, it was hysterical!" Those toys would show up periodically over time in the weirdest places - the safe, the cash drawer, guarding my purse, the plushie that was perched like a vulture over my desk...

But this one story takes the cake. And the pan it came in.

I worked for my boss. ONLY my boss, no matter how many people thought I was part of a ride share program. There were two jewelers under the same roof, but different skills, different customers, and different specialties. Separate businesses. Sometimes the two would trade off jobs, but the bills were itemized and split accordingly. The one time the other jeweler thought he could poach me to run an hour out of my way on the clock to drop off some repairs at another jewelry store that didn't do their own repairs, my boss made him pay for that time. Plus gas and wear, since it was my personal car. Stopped the poaching attempts for a time, too.

The other jeweler...was a closet alcoholic. We didn't realize how bad it was till after he died, and we found the dozens of empty bottles of rotgut vodka hidden in the walls and ceiling. We also didn't realize how often he was blackout drunk and didn't remember what had happened. I am also deathly allergic to alcohol. This makes for what we call in the biz, An Interesting Situation.

I was on a strict Tuesday-through-Friday schedule. No weekends, no alarm code, and no keys to get into the building. My boss was on the same schedule, with the addition of three hours on a Saturday morning. When the clock hit noon, my boss was outta there so fast he left a negative image in the shape of a dissipating cloud, and a small sonic boom. (Once, he really did that. He learned how to make blue gold, tried it, and woke up feet away from his bench, flat on his back, with no eyebrows and a perfect smoke ring above where his chair used to be. Listen to me! IF YOU DECIDE TO ATTEMPT MAKING BLUE GOLD, YOU DO IT UNDER A PROTECTIVE LAYER OF OIL!!! Moving on....)

So imagine my boss' surprise when he arrives for work, on a Tuesday morning, and sits down at his desk for a good hours' worth of Starcraft before hitting the work bench, and his monitor is saying

SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS-

And when he checked the logs, his computer had been emulating a snake since late Saturday night.

He, of course, tried all the things. Unplug, plug in, turn on and off. When the computer refused to get out of Parseltongue Mode, he did what any frustrated person would do - he picked up the keyboard, and dropped it on the desk in annoyance.

And the keyboard said: SLOSH.

Slosh. Slosh is a bad, baaaaad keyboard noise to make.

Boss unplugged the keyboard, and the monitor immediately stopped recording the mating call of the Greater Shiny-Liking Python. He took the offending keyboard to the bathroom and grabbed a suspicious knocked-over tumbler aside of the keyboard, one that he knew he didn't leave there Saturday morning. He tilted the keyboard over the tumbler, and poured an almost-full glass of whiskey into it.

One trip to the local electronics store later, and a new keyboard in place - and a whole morning's productivity shot - he waited for the only other guy with a key to come in so he could present evidence.

The answer?

It must have been the Jill-of-all-trades, he insisted, pointing at me.

Soooo... Somehow, I broke into my boss' house (I've never been there), found his keys (I don't even know to this day where he hides them, and he does), extract the code (what, out of his mind, psychically, without waking him??), get in the shop (Cameras! That record sound!), play Starcraft on my boss' computer (I've never played, and wouldn't my logging in leave, like, a record of craptastic play time?), and sip on a drink that for me is Liquid Death, till I poured the rest into the keyboard in an angry rage?

Don't you think a hospital run would have factored into this story a bit more prominently than, say, not at all? And would I have had time to lock up, reset the security system, and wipe all traces of my activity from the logs and replace it with his, while choking in anaphylactic shock? Bets, anyone?

And what was co-worker doing on my boss' computer anyway? He has his own desk and computer and copy of the game installed, and was playing under his own account and password. That I also don't know. So many questions!

But because he didn't remember any of it, he didn't do it. So therefore it had to be me, framing him. He refused to pay for the new keyboard.

Trust me, if I had to break into my boss' awesome shop to do Nefarious Deeds, you'd find me wrapped up in all the pretty pretty jewelry, sleeping off my shiny high of wearing six figures' worth of drool-worthy rings and necklaces and earrings and sorry I have to go now and lie down for a minute...

I'm back. I would NOT be playing Starcraft in the middle of the night, alone, when I had my own World of Warcraft setup at home with hubby.

For years I regretted that my boss tossed that keyboard so quickly, and threw it in the dumpster, before I got to work. I get it, he was protecting me from residual fumes, because he took my allergy seriously even when Some Co-workers didn't. But oh, how I wanted to make a reliquary of it, hand out random letter keys to IT techs we told the story to, as proof of The Keyboard That Sloshed at Midnight!