2001-11-27 - 10:56 a.m.

Quite a few people, in the past few weeks, have asked me what happened to my diary. Why I haven't been writing lately. I've been saying that I don't have anything to write about, but in truth, I did. I had one thing to write about, and it was *so* stupid and pointless that I didn't want to do it. But for some reason, every time I thought about writing, this came to mind. So, I'm sorry, this next entry it about to be very stupid, but I can't help it.

There are a lot of people I work with who I could write about. Various interesting, distinct characters who all have plenty of things I could say about them. I've occasionally thought about writing about the large, angry, very obviously sexually frustrated woman who seems to think I'm a complete imbecile, but if there was anyone I'd be worried might actually stumble across it in her searches online, it's her. And besides, there's one more person who I find even more interesting to write about than her. And the thing that makes him the most unique is the simple fact that he doesn't actually work for our company.

Gary. The NCR repairman. Gary made his first appearance in this diary informing my co-workers and myself that we wouldn't be able to start working until about 11:30 PM.

On first glance at Gary, I thought he belonged in a fifties beach movie rather than the item processing department of a bank. A portly man in a Hawaiian shirt, his jolly, though normally a little confused, look is framed perfectly by his thin salt-and-pepper facial hair and round cheeks.

Gary has a very laid-back feel to him with everything he does. Even when he had to inform our whole department we wouldn't be out of work until (at his initial estimate) about 4:30 in the morning, he had this leaning, "what can ya do?" smile over his obviously apologetic face. He's one of few people I've met who will actually listen to what you tell him, even if he already thinks he knows what's going wrong. Granted, some times it takes a little while to get him to do so, but he will. And rather than blowing the job off and trying to go with the simple fix, if the long-term fix is necessary, he'll do it.

Though, I don't know, it's possible the reason I like Gary is he's one of few people in the department who genuinely seems to respect me all the time. When there's a problem, no matter who called it in, he'll ask me about it. Part of that probably comes from the fact that I have a much better memory for detail than most people in the department, so I can describe what went wrong better than they can after 18 hours of being away from it, while some people there couldn't describe the problem after fifteen minutes. Then there is the woman mentioned at the beginning who seems to have the memory of a goldfish, and her memory gets blurred after a matter of seconds.

Another part of the fact that Gary talks to me probably comes from a few days after the Hell night, when another, yet far smaller, problem had been coming up with the sorters. Every time we started running some checks through, the very first item, no matter what we did, would stop in the machine and we'd get an error that is almost impossible to get when only one item is going through. Gary had convinced himself that the problem was simply that the things we were running through were bent and messed up, which would, seriously, cause the problem. I, however, knew that wasn't the problem, and stayed on him until he listened to what I was telling him, until I'd convinced him to look more in-depth at the problem. After opening up the sorter and checking it out, he discovered that one of the lenses in one of the cameras had cracked and needed to be replaced. Since then, we haven't had the problem once. And since then, he's always listened to what I had to tell him about the machines, no matter who called him about the problem. And wouldn't you know it, the problems actually get fixed now.

Amazing how these things work sometimes, huh?