Archive of Our Own ^beta

This is what happens when you try and get an impossibly large task done to meet a tight deadline. First, stuff goes wrong and you have to do a post mortem, and then you have to get someone else to finish it for you, and after that, everything goes to shit.

Six learned this the hard way. It started after she responded to the following math question:

A bag of gumdrops has 24 candies. Elaine draws eight candies, 4 pink, 3 white, and 1 green. How many of each color were in the bag to start with, and how many are there now?

with this:

You don’t know because you only drew one sample.

She had a point. You need to draw 25,000 samples to get enough information about a population. But the teacher, Charles Krupp, refused to accept it, and she got demerits for “goofing around in class”.

Six lucked out. Because her answer was technically correct (the best kind of correct), he had to let her work them off. Krupp had a second house out in Long Branch. It had aluminum wiring all up in the upstairs, and he couldn’t sell it until the wires were fixed. Six’s job was to replace the wiring.

After starting the work, she discovered that Krupp’s wiring had more problems besides being made of aluminum. The stuff in the walls had almost entirely broken off with the wires in the ceiling. The circuit stayed completed through sheer force of will. Some of the wires had melted together into nodes of blobs and wires radiating out. Islands of insulation dotted otherwise naked wires.

Although the wiring in that house was pure crap, Six got the job done quickly. The wires in the ceiling were copper, and she didn’t need to cut anything because stuff was already disconnected. Also, that house had drop ceiling tiles secured to a frame with velcro in the walls in place of drywall, a look that she thought was just awful.

Problem: just before she thought she was finished, something caused the fuses to go out. An investigation revealed that this was because the dryer was plugged into a socket in the bedroom. You don’t need a dryer in the bedroom, even if it is to warm up your pants before you put them on during the winter months. Dryers draw way more power than most stuff you find in a bedroom, the circuit for the bedroom can’t carry that big a load.

~

Good news: the wiring job was done. Bad news: identifying what caused the fuse to go out took her substantially longer than expected. Now she would not be able to fix the fuse and make it to her recital.

Enter Seven. Six figured she could get Seven to change the fuse for her. This would turn out to be a step in the wrong direction. “OK Seven, this is really straightforward,” she explained, “but you do need to pay attention to how much power the fuses can handle, otherwise you’ll have to start over again.”

Seven nodded. “All righty.”

Six handed him a piece of paper. “The instructions on changing the fuses are here. The fuses that need to be switched out, I’ve marked them with purple tape. The fresh fuses are over there” she said, pointing to a Tupperware bowl on the floor.

Seven looked at the instructions. He got nervous upon discovering that they were long enough to go on both sides of the page. “Golly, that’s a long list of instructions,” he said.

Six shook her head. “No, it’s not really that long, it spilled over on both sides of the page because it’s got lots of pictures of what the different gauges of fuse look like.” The reason she had to have so many pictures of what the different kinds of fuses looked like it’s because the fuses that blew out were not all the same gauge. Four fuses blew out, and all four of them were different gauges.

Seven notice something interesting at the bottom of the back of the page. Six had written after changing the fuses, come immediately to the concert hall with a brandy glass full of jellybeans – positively no red. “What does the brandy glass with no red jelly beans have to do with fuses?” Seven asked.

“It’s to make sure you read the instructions.” Indeed, Six knew that Seven had a hard time paying attention to written instructions. If she couldn’t be there to supervise them, she had to find a clever way to make sure Seven had done what he was supposed to. In her mind, it was no different than Van Halen and that famous bowl of M&Ms with all the brown candies removed because it meant that the stagehands followed the instructions on how to rig the set for the concert.

“Okey-dokey,” Seven replied.

“Terrific. Now I gotta go,” Six said as she took off.

Seven didn’t read the instructions. Instead, he put crumpled-up newspaper in the fusebox.

The building inspector showed up to check the wiring. Since Seven told her that he put the fuses in, she turned the power on. They both ran away because the house caught on fire. That’s what happens when you put newspaper in the fuse box.

~

Six arrived at her dance recital. It was a good thing that her class was scheduled to do their peace towards the end because they had some extra time to rehearse before going on stage. During that time, they noticed that the teacher had changed the music for the recital from “Caribbean Blue” to Samantha Ronson’s “Built This Way” from Mean Girls. Everyone, not just Six, felt extremely disoriented by the whole thing.

Some people didn’t get as badly thrown off as others. Claudia did part of the routine backwards. Renata, like Six, got it right; she just moved slowly with a puzzled and cheesed-off expression on her. Jennifer did this thing where she started dancing, stopped, and started dancing again. She looked like a buffering YouTube video.

Others forgot them entirely. Leona and Evelyn just stood there with confused looks on their faces. At one point, Evelyn even ran off and hid. Integra tried to cover the fact that she had no idea what to do. She didn’t fool anybody. All she did was pantomime washing a window and the Saturday night fever disco pointing thing. “Are you kidding me?” Six muttered under her breath.

Six had every right to be pissed off about the change in music. Everyone did the steps to "Caribbean Blue," they’ve been practicing the dance to that song for months. Now, all the signposts went bye-bye. Nobody had their cues to what came next. Whose bright idea was it to change the music from “Caribbean Blue” to Samantha Ronson’s “Built This Way”? Those two songs don’t even sound the same.

That didn’t stop Integra from saying, “If this is about the music, then the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

“OK, Integra, What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means Caribbean Blue is offensive,” Integra said in a sanctimonious tone.

“How can it be offensive?” Six said way too loud, “Caribbean Blue is about a beautiful blue sea!”

In a blinding flash of stupidity, Integra responded with, "Enya’s English, right? So if an English person sings about the Caribbean, it’s because they’re nostalgic for colonialism."

Nothing about what Integra said made any sense. Back in the day, everybody colonized the Caribbean. The English, the Spanish, the French, you name it, they set up shop down there. Also, Enya’s not English; she’s Irish. What Integra said made about as much sense as saying you like to eat pasta because your house is made of bricks.

Renata took a deep breath. “OK, Integra. I can only put up with your lack of common sense for so long, but calling Irish people English is enough to warrant an ass-kicking in many parts of the world; including this one, genius!” she reprimanded.

Integra glared at Renata. “Why are you even here, Renata?” she said as she aggressively shrugged, “I thought they kicked you out because you looked bad in your costume.”

Renata’s not fat, but she’s not skinny. The top part outfit they had her in originally looked like it was cling wrapped to her belly. It made her look like she was at least five months pregnant. She made a replacement costume for herself. “I made a new costume for myself at school during art class. Problem solved.” she declared, beaming. “Granted they thought I was making a dress for prom and suspended me because getting your outfits for prom ready before the tickets go on sale constitutes trying to sneak into the prom. Also, I'm a freshman and prom is for seniors only.” she continued, chuckling slightly.

“Nobody asked you, fat ass,” Integra clapped back, “Do you know if it weren’t for your friend the earthquake with legs, you’d be the fattest one here.”

Six did not appreciate that. “You know, if you put your foot any further in your mouth, we would have to do the Heimlich maneuver!”

Evelyn got scared that a fight would soon break out and pulled the fire alarm. Everybody left.

~

When Seven got to the concert hall, he saw everybody standing in front of the building. This made him feel nervous because he knew that meant a fire alarm had gone off. Things catching on fire scared him. “Nothing…nothing caught on fire here, did it?” he asked nervously.

“No, nothing’s on fire,” Six remarked, “Evelyn pulled the alarm because she doesn’t like it when people argue.”

He gave Six the brandy glass with the jelly beans. She noticed that they were all red. The instructions said no red, not all red. “Seven,” she asked in a concerned and corporate tone, “what did you do?”

Seven stood there with a flummoxed look on his face. “Well…um,” he began.

“Please tell me you changed the fuses,” Six said, cutting him off.

Seven made himself small. He stammered, “I…couldn’t find the fresh fuses, so I just put newspaper in the fusebox.”

Six couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She had shown him where the fresh fuses were. She had given him written instructions with pictures and what the different fuses look like. How could he have possibly screwed this up? He had one job. “What?!”

Seven started to panic. “I thought I put the fuses in and took the newspaper out, but then I turned the power back on and the house went…”

“Oh, God, no,” Six groaned.

Seven fidgeted with his hands, “ker-plooey.”

Six couldn't take it. Between getting demerits for providing an unexpected but correct answer to a math problem, having the music for her dance recital changed because the song was supposedly "offensive", and now Seven proving his complete and utter incompetence in following written instructions, she just completely lost it. "YOU PUT CRUMPLED NEWSPAPER IN THE FUSE BOX AND TURNED THE POWER BACK ON?!?! NO WONDER HIS HOUSE EXPLODED!!!!"

"Well, maybe Mr. Krupp won’t notice," Seven chuckled nervously.

"Yeah, he’s definitely going to notice his house burned down!" Six scoffed.

Krupp’s house hadn’t just burned down. Within a few hours, the blaze became so intense that it not only converted what used to be the house into ash, but it left a smoldering crater where the house used to be. Six had given Seven a simple job, and he still managed to screw it up so badly that everything quite literally went up in smoke. It would be the last time she would trust him to do anything that required him to follow written instructions.