Your office just caught fire. Folks are screaming. Smoke is everywhere. You think so just saw the office clown basting some ribs over an open fire pit inside his cubicle. As you make your way to the designated fireproof stairway, you’re at least consoled that once you get in there it’ll be rough but safe journey down the high-rise to the street. You’re glad for this, for a whole bunch of your elder coworkers can’t get around too fast.

Oh my, it’s getting really hot, but you’re close. You get to the stairwell, and, and, the door handle’s broken off. What? How? But don’t worry, there’s a little yellow sticky over the door handle hole. In exquisite cursive it says the door will be fixed today. You take this yellow sticky, and you hug it tight. Then you and your coworkers are slowly incinerated over several agonizing minutes. Your only consolation (beyond the kind sticky note) is you’ll probably succumb to smoke inhalation long before hungry fire meets your tasty, tasty flesh.

In my kind place of employment, the door handle to the escape stairway was broken for four days before they got a handle on it. I’m sure this wasn’t a big deal, that didn’t violate seventeen different laws, but whatever. Oh, also, this building was renovated less than six months ago. So apparently a renovated new door handle last six months. You would think folks could / would fix an emergency door handle in like seven minutes. Nope.

You know my work is asked / trusted by a whole lot of people to operate and solve huge problems. I wonder if those people who trust us know we’re such a mess we can’t even fix normal basic things that a homeowner could ask the 13 year old to take a crack at.

We even had a fire in the basement on Tuesday that luckily didn’t require evacuation. Otherwise it’s like, uh, do we take the elevator? Does that thing even still work? Apparently, yes, it did. We would have used that to escape our doom.

Wow, humanity sure does suck. We can’t do anything right. Luckily, soon enough machines or aliens will be our masters and faulty emergency door handles will be the least of our problems. Or maybe one of those seven exoplanets they found yesterday is composed entirely of door repair personnel. Here’s hoping.