Technician Tales: Accidental Incarceration!

Cleaning aviaries in senior living facilities—especially memory care—can have its share of ups and downs. One thing that I have certainly learned is that you never quite know what to expect! Some days are routine and simple, others are a masterpiece of surprises and potential although minor catastrophes. But don’t get me wrong, whether it’s one or the other, I embrace them all!

I can recall one morning, during a fairly routine cleaning that things went a bit sideways. It was in a memory care facility; all the residents were elsewhere—eating breakfast I believe—while I cleaned the aviary in the activities room and chatted to a staff member about how the birds were doing. He was an older fellow and it made me happy to see how excited he was about the new trio of shaft tail finches that had just hatched. When I first got this job, it didn’t take long to discover that the staff and even the residents’ family members like the birds nearly as much as the residents do!

After a while, we fell into an amiable silence and I focused my full attention onto scrubbing the wood of the aviary. It was at this moment that I heard the familiar clinking of my keys which I had left hanging in one of the aviary’s two locks. At first, I thought nothing of it, I was moving inside the aviary quite a bit and I figured that the shifting to and fro must be shaking the large structure and therefore the keys, as well. However, the sound persisted and as I turned around to figure out the problem, I saw the staff member locking one of the doors of the aviary. A quick glance at the other door revealed he had already locked it. Of course, I laughed, thinking it was a joke, but it was soon evident that things were to the contrary. More so than I could have realized.

It turned out the staff member was not a staff member at all, but a smartly dressed resident! Having pieced this together, I desperately called out to him, but he had already wandered off—my keys in hand—while I had been laughing and thinking the whole thing was a prank. I was trapped in the aviary! I tried to appear nonchalant as I waited for a real staff member to walk by and free me, but I couldn’t help laughing at the hilarity of the whole situation. Now I knew what it was like to be a bird! Although, no one came by to ooh and ah, the way they do when looking at the birds inside the aviary.

To make a long story short, I was freed from my temporary enclosure and I got my keys back too! And rest assured, I have since been very careful about where I leave my keys!