Key Cabinet

[talon]

I have this cabinet full of keys that I'm in charge of at work - keys to all the buildings and the rooms and the company cars and gates and everything. Mostly it just sits there beside my desk, providing me with yet another surface upon which I can set things: books, boxes, projects...

The keys are sorted according to their purpose and each purpose has a different drawer. In the summer, we don't use one entire category of keys, so I lock that drawer to prevent Security from handing them out.

This year, when I unlocked the drawer, Itzl told me it made a terrible, ear-splitting noise. Every time I opened the drawer, he'd head butt me and shake his head, pawing at his ears.

So I had Maintenance grease the squeaky wheels.

Except - apparently, it wasn't the wheels making the noise. Or so Itzl said.

So I finally got down with mirrors and tweezers and files and flashlights and a magnifying glass and found the problem.

A piece of Scotch tape was crumpled up inside the wheel track, scratching back and forth every time the drawer was opened and closed.

Itzl got very grumpy before I was finished, but when I held up the offending bit of tape, he laughed and watched as I opened and closed the drawer soundlessly.

With a huge sigh and a slurp of his tongue, he went over to one of his beds (yes, he has several beds scattered across my desk - I have a huge desk, big enough to hold 4 Itzl-sized doggie beds, his food and water dishes, and still leave me enough room to do all of my work), and settled in for a catnap.

One eye, of course, pops open every time someone enters my office, and he'll glare out the north window at the construction crew if they get too rowdy outside, and he alerts every time the phone rings, because he chose the bed I placed beside the phone.

But yay - I found the reason Itzl suddenly hated the key cabinet and fixed it where the maintenance people couldn't figure it out.

Now to fix that wheel that jams when I roll it around.