job hazard

Yesterday I hurt my wrist badly enough that today I've been feeling pain whenever I move it. Would you like to know how it happened?

It didn't occur during an altercation with a teenage computer geek overstepping the bounds of what's allowed at the library computers.

It wasn't caused by major haste to get outside of the olfactory zone of a particularly odorous patron.

I wasn't hit by a free-flying Shorter Oxford Dictionary.

I didn’t stumble and fall on the edge of the Information Desk during an alcoholic staff dinner.

It didn’t happen in ‘Nam.

I strained my wrist trying to push a teeny-tiny lever which is located underneath the driver’s seat of the library bus; a lever which is not only a long way to reach for me but which is also annoyingly stiff. All I was trying to do was push this lever so that I could swivel the driver’s seat around to face the back of the bus, so that I could sit down and face the patrons at the same time.

There will be an Occupational Health and Safety form to complete and send to the appropriate people, a doctor’s visit to make and possibly several subsidised trips to a conveniently placed physiotherapy clinic too.

I’m sure that in time it’ll heal almost completely, although on days preceding especially wet weather it will ache as though to warn me to pack my raincoat in the morning. But if I’m lucky I will get a week or two’s break from being a bus driver, allowing me to spend more time on other stuff (I’ll think of something).