Wasted potential

I had just made it into work after my curb incident when a man requested a chocolate soft serve. I hesitated for a moment, recalling that the week before, the chocolate soft serve hadn’t been working. Once my manager confirmed that it was operable, I grabbed a cone and headed to the soft serve faucet. I held down the lever, but vanilla ice cream came out! I looked down at the cone, now full of vanilla soft serve when the customer had requested chocolate.

Kneeling, I looked up into the machine to trace the source of the madness. With great irritation, I found that the chocolate and vanilla had been switched. To say the least, I had been thrown for a loop.

I looked down again into the cone to see the unrequested vanilla. My heart ached with solace as I reached towards the garbage can to let the cone fall inside.

Such wasted potential, such a needless loss of life.