Expensive lessons and evaporating ice cream

A few weeks ago, I popped by URS on my day off. I needed some milk. It was close. Look, I don’t hafta justify myself to you. I needed stuff and they had it (man, I’m awful at writing intros). Even though it was my day off, a minor crisis was ensuing that caught my attention. One of the freezers had stopped working leaving about $300-worth of ice cream in perilous danger. The manager on duty and two crew member huddled around the freezer, trying to assess what to do. As they poked their heads around the appliance, I gave it a quick look. Not because I wanted to help URS, but I do enjoy fixing things. To me, it looked like the freezer wasn’t getting any power. The lights were all off. It made no sounds at all. And it was a balmy 58 degrees inside (while I am not an expert in the specifics of turning milk into ice cream, I’m fairly certain keeping it at a temperature under 58 degrees is involved).

“Did you check the circuit breakers,” I asked the manager. I’m pretty sure he heard me, but he seemed too focused on the state of the ice cream to respond.

“We can’t sell this,” he said.

“Why not,” asked one of my on-duty colleagues.

“You can’t refreeze ice cream,” the manager said.

I squeezed a tub of Dryers. It was more milkshake than ice cream. “He’s right–look at this. It’s still semi-cold now–maybe if you froze it now it would be okay, but you don’t even have a working freezer.”

“Repair man won’t be here for at least four hours,” the manager said.

“Won’t it get hard when it freezes?”

The manager explained to my younger coworkers how the refrozen ice cream would develop ice particles and essentially be ruined. I don’t think they quite understood, but since they are URS employees they did as they were told. The manager instructed them to throw away the ice cream. No reason to keep around melting ice cream for four hours.

As they were bagging up the melting dairy, I asked a coworker if he checked the circuit breaker. I would have done it myself, but the managers made it very clear to me that there are certain areas within URS I’m not allowed to visit when I’m not on duty. I thought maybe–maybe–if the ice cream was immediately refrozen it might’ve been saved. Unfortunately, my junior colleague didn’t seem to know what a circuit breaker was. At least that’s what I came to find out much, much later. He smiled and nodded and pretended to know what I was talking about, much like people do when they don’t want to appear ignorant.

This weekend (much closer to 400 hours than 4 hours), the freezer repair man arrived. This time I was on duty, so I was able to lead him back to the circuit breaker. To be honest, I hadn’t thought of the broken freezer since it died. I figured the bosses were on top of it and it wasn’t my job to wonder why it hadn’t been fixed yet. Even when I saw the repair man, I figured it was probably his third or four attempt to fix the freezer.

“Nope, first time here,” he said. “That’s why we should check the breaker first.”

And with the flick of a finger, he was able to fix the supposedly dead freezer. Sure enough, the breaker had tripped. It was even easy to identify because A) things were actually labeled correctly and B) it was the only breaker that had tripped. He hung around for the next couple hours to see if the breaker tripped again (which would indicate there actually was something wrong with the freezer), but it proved to be unnecessary. There was nothing wrong with the freezer and the whole brouhaha was cause by something as minute as a tripped breaker.

This is just yet another example of how clueless URS is. Three hundred dollars worth of ice cream wasted (a fact that makes The Wife cry). Two or three billed hours for the repair man. Three weeks of lost ice cream sales. All because no one checked the stupid circuit breaker.