For over two and half years there was this dial on the wall at my old place of work (Circuit City).
A mysterious dial. I asked around and curiously, nobody knew what the dial did. Managers that had been there twenty-some years didn’t know and never bothered with it. Veteran Customer ServiceUnmarked. Unnamed. Unknown.Associates that knew the intricacies of Circuit City fine print were unaware of its purpose. Even the Janitor had no fucking clue.

A year… an entire year, I never dared to touch the dial out of fear that I might unknowingly twist the building on fire without a working knowledge of this wheel of fortune; that I might turn the wheel of fate and disrupt the space time continuum within the vicinity of the building and bring about the collapse of molecular stability; that I would set the time off a nuclear holocaust leaving a fraction of the earth’s population set back to the stone age to evolve once again…. well, I suppose I was worried that I’d get my ass fired for turning a knob.

You would. Don’t Lie.

So what does one do with a mysterious knob that could potentially do any number of things? Have a sucker take the fall, let a schmuck take the heat. duh. 

I psyched myself up for a week to crank that knob. I went through the game plan in my head and ironed out the wrinkles to prevent the deed from coming back to me should the dial lead to complete anarchy. I had previously asked a not-so-well-liked employee about the knob. He was chronically late to work which left other employees covering his department and while it could not be proven, he was suspected of stealing. He was that kinda guy that if you had a big enough condom and had a little imagination looked and acted like a giant dick. His response to the purpose of the dial, of course, was a shrug followed by “I don’t know”. Bingo. I had myself a scapegoat. 

I waited for the moment when the sap was in the room alone with the dial “working” diligently on sprucing up his facebook account. The computer he was at faced away from the only entrance and exit leaving him vulnerable. I quietly crept into the room peeking around the corner to make doubly sure the victim was unaware of my presence. All was well.
The plan in action.
I flipped the dial wildly like a crack addict shooting up his first for the day and escaped like a jack rabbit on a greasy griddle in the middle of hot summer day. I pretended to tend to a wounded PC nearby watching the door carefully without trying to be conspicuous.

Nothing.

Nothing happened… nothing at all. From that point on, I would use the dial as a meter to describe how hard I was going to work. “I feel like a three today” and I would say to anyone in the room and flip the dial to the appropriate position. What began as a small act to start the day eventually became a full blown ceremony, stating my level of workmanship and promptly rounding the almighty dial to reflect as such. That damn dial is just one more thing I’m gonna miss from that god forsaken shit hole of a building. 

Oh, and the dial just controls the volume of the paging system in the room. Go Figure.