REM

Malfunctioning Monday

I hate Mondays. Not because it means my weekend is over, but because Murphy's Law applies to anything and everything on that day. You would think it would happen on a Friday, but it's never busy so I could care less if something malfunctioned.

Today was a typical Monday. I woke up reluctantly and dragged myself into work with a coffee in my hand and bagel in my mouth. Surprisingly I didn't spill or drop either on my way in, which is what happened last week.

Sitting down at my desk, I saw a glimmer of hope that today was going to go differently. That was until I was paged to the warehouse floor an hour later after completing some paperwork.

"Sorry to bug you, sir, but as you can see, we have a problem."

Greg pointed his thumb over his shoulder at the box stacking robot. It was tossing everything around, ruining stacks of boxes and then sometimes re-stacking them just to knock them all down again. It actually reminded me of a child I used to babysit who did the same thing.

"Awesome..." I mumbled, placing my hands on my hips.

Walking over to the machine, I made sure to stay out of its range of motion. Flying boxes full of product would surely hurt me, but I could dodge those with ease compared to a large metal arm swinging out randomly at me with claw-like fingers on the end of it.

I tried using the voice commands since the machine was out of control, but none of them seemed to work.

"Robot, stop." The machine ignored my command. "Robot, turn off." Again the thing continued to fling boxes in the air, forcing me to side step a few of them in the process.

Sighing, I knew there wasn't much else I could do than to pull the fuse block. The malfunctioning of the robot would set us further and further behind if it continued, so it was best to cut our losses at that time and just do the stacking of pallets manually like the good ol' days.

"Greg," I called out. "Go pull the fuse block for this area. Looks like today we're going to be doing all the manual labour ourselves."