At Wit's End

Call Me Normal

It’s been said that ordinary people do extraordinary things when circumstances allow. My coworkers at the First National Bank and Trust were about the most ordinary people I knew. In fact, they were so ordinary I never even noticed most of them. Oh, sure, I passed by and smiled and asked how they were, but I never got any answer other than, “Fine, thank you.” Even when our Chief Accountant Bob Johnson’s, mother died last year, he gave me that answer. It was expected, normal. That changed on January 20th when twelve people and myself were involved in the most extraordinary event any human being could experience.

Coincidence can be the catalyst for fate. Chaos theory suggests that life is just one random incident bouncing off another random incident. While there may be some truth to that, I still believe that what we do with our chaos state is our own choice. It was coincidence that brought us to the bomb shelter that morning, our annual disaster drill.

Every year, risk management made sure that we went through the drill. It got us out of our routine existence for at least an hour once a year, but even getting out of our routine was routine for this group. It was scheduled on the same hour, of the same day, of the same year, every year. There was no way that we could’ve known that the fate of the entire world would be forever changed at the moment we stepped into that bomb shelter and closed the door behind us. All thirteen of us felt ourselves suddenly thrown to the ground and there was a loud roar unlike anything we had ever heard before. When the roaring stopped we picked ourselves up and brushed ourselves off. The silence was frightening. Earthquake, we thought, or perhaps an explosion of some kind. Our first instinct was to step outside, but I suggested otherwise.

“Hey, what if it really was a nuclear explosion?” I suggested, “They’ve always told us not to leave the bomb shelter if something happens, haven’t they? I mean, if this is the real thing, we can’t just walk out there into the nuclear fallout.”

Everyone looked at one another in confusion. No one seemed able to come to a decision. Mary Ferris, a young girl in her early twenties had always seemed to me to be somewhat timid. She was one of the tellers and hadn’t been working in our office all that long. She spotted a small radio on the shelf, picked it up and tried to find a radio station to get more information. There was nothing. Not a single radio station was on the air. There was nothing but static.

“That’s crazy!” Loan supervisor, Bill Henry’s flushed, puffy face looked irritated, but then, that wasn’t that unusual for him, “There’s got to be something wrong with it!” He grabbed the radio and started to play with it. “There’s got to be at least one radio station out there that we can pick up.”

“Maybe the antenna’s broken or maybe we just can’t get reception in here,” Sheila Shriftland inserted. Sheila was a long-time bank employee. She had started as a teller in the 60’s and had worked her way up to account manager. She always knew where everything was and was good at fixing every problem. I guess at some level we all wondered if she could fix this one, too.

“I tested the equipment last week in preparation for the drill, it all worked fine.” Nothing but silence followed Tom Stillman’s words. Even Tom didn’t have anything to say, and Tom was usually outgoing and talkative. His ivy-league education and easy manner are what got him his position as Bank Manager. Of course, being the brother-in-law to the District Manager could’ve been a real plus, too, especially since Tom’s age would’ve been a liability, but everyone kept those opinions to themselves. He looked good for a sixty-year-old, though.

In the silence, we all looked around the room. I took a mental inventory of the rest of the group: Mariana Lopez, teller, 50, menopausal; Sean Pressler, 25, teller, lack of initiative, but physically fit; Chereese Tyler-Tibbs, 37, Administrative Assistant, efficient with a tendency to gossip; Caroline Greene, Loan Officer, 40, divorced, what you might call an “assertive” woman; Shari Lorenz, 28, pretty but self-involved; Joe Miller, 55, Maintenance/Custodian, grumpy, but can fix anything; Patricia Martin, 34, pretty, smart, and distant; and Bob Johnson, 58, Chief Accountant, never married, nervous, and currently extremely sweaty.