When Charlie walked into the lab, he paused by the door, and made a funny face. He scrunched his nose, and sniffed the air. “What’s that smell?”
“What smell?” Charlie was always asking stupid questions. “I don’t smell anything.”
Charlie sniffed the air again. “It smells like burnt plastic.”
“Burnt plastic?”
“Yeah.”
Panic grabbed me, and started dragging me through the lab, from one computer to the next, sniffing the air around each one. “Shit! Crap! Crud! Jesus! Damn!” I moved quickly through the lab.
Charlie sniffed the air, “What’s that smell?”
“One of the machines is letting its smoke out!” I moved quickly from system to system, “Help me find it!”
Charlie tried to follow his nose to the smells source. I kept racing from machine to machine. Burning plastic was the worst smell to have in a computer lab, and the source of one of the oldest jokes. “Computers work on smoke. If you let the smoke out, they stop working.”
“Found it!” Charlie called out.
“Unplug it! Unplug it!” I raced toward the system he stood next to. He actually listened, and pulled the power cord out of the computer. I pulled the maintenance panel off, and peered inside at an ocean of blown capacitors, and melted plastic, then looked at Charlie.
And I couldn’t help myself. I had to sing it. “Another one bites the dust. Another one bites the dust. And another one’s gone, another one’s gone, another one bites the dust.”
247 Words
@LurchMunster
I wrote this for Siobhan Muir‘s #ThursThreads, Week 118. Please go read all the entries in this week’s #ThursThreads. They are good reading.
