Ticket Maschine (Prompt #1)

 It was a good morning. 

A pigeon cuddled up on my depression gray flat roof. 

The night was calm for a saturday. 

I neither got pissed or puked on. I call this a win. And a first. 

The sun has risen and with the pigeon leaving I am warming up the little engines. Make all the little wheels turn in synchronization with Fredderick, the clock who is always slightly late. Ever so slightly that no one notices until they missed their train. If you ever missed your train at munich central station it might have been Freddericks fault. 

He has been slacking off for years now without consequences. Probably because he makes the trains look more on time, or because in the age of smartphones and smartwatches and smartasses few people pay attention to a dumb clock crowned with bird poop. 

He gets to sleep in on sunday mornings. I don´t. For some reason the humans still need paper tickets printed.  My theory is that they have not caught up yet with all their smart devices and get overwhelmed sometimes. I understand that. I have sympathy for that. That little slap of paper, the satisfying clicking of the stamping machine, it gives you a sense of certainty doesn´t it? It's like a little proof that you are actually going somewhere. That you came from somewhere in the first place. These snippets will collect in your pockets and you eventually clean them out, sometimes remembering where you went, sometimes not. 

Did you keep the ticket that took you to the first date where you met your first love? 

Maybe you are not as sentimental as I am, but cut me some slack. I am a ticket machine at a central station of a major unimportant city. If I would not romanticize the shit out of my job I would hate it and overdose on printing toner in a week and we really don't want that to happen, so bear with me. 

The first customer hits the screen quite impatiently at 7 am in the morning. (at least that's what Fredderick says) He wants to print a ticket to Wolfratshausen and while wondering if there are any wolves in Wolfratshausen and if they also refuse complete digitalisation I notice that my printing paper got stuck between tire seven and eight. 

This. Is. Not. Good. 

Why does that always happen to me? Is it because I daydream? Maybe some pigeon feathers got into my machinery or a mouse. Again. 

Probably. That sounds way more plausible than a daydream causing the malfunction. Try to explain that I was distracted by the thought of technically advanced wolves and therefore messed up my tire order to the technician, he would think you are nuts. 

That thought made me giggle a little. The paper gets even more stuck. 

Oh shit. Try to explain that to the technician. I suppress the next nervous giggle. 

Fredderick goes back a second and forwards three, which if noticeable to the regular eye means “this clock is broken go check your phone instead”, what few people know is that it means “you dumbass did you really do it again? What did you daydream about this time? Was it nice? Please tell me later when we are alone and I swear I will not make fun of your mother again.”  The last sentence is freely interpreted. It could have also been a joke about my mother. 

Nonetheless this banter does not solve my problem as I notice another person queuing up to get their ticket. Oh no. What do I do? 

There is really nothing I can do. The man already inserted the coins. 

I look through the instructions. Maybe there are new ones. It is certainly not a new scenario, but my code reveals nothing. A scan of the recent updates. Nothing. 

I panic. Another customer. Frantically I start looking for a notification to print on screen. There is nothing fitting really and so I just flip through the images and error codes. 

The man looks puzzled. I feel puzzled. This would have never happened if he were a fully digitalised wolf. But he is a man and he barely even has a beard and apparently no clue what digitalisation means and that tickets  have to be printed on paper made of real wood. From real trees. With squirrels living in them. Even I know that and I am a fucking ticket machine. 

I should not be thinking about homeless squirrels in this situation. Really. I would breathe in and out but, well, you know … I am a machine, so I do the thing that comes closest to that.

I will  restart.