The Night Shift at the Cracker Factory

Wanjiru had been a supervisor for exactly three weeks, and she had one goal for every night shift. The crackers had to be in their boxes by six in the morning, when the trucks left for the supermarkets. From ten at night until six, the factory belonged to her and eleven workers, the smell of warm salt and the steady rattle of the production line.

At 3:07, the rattle stopped. The packing machine, a huge green monster that folded the boxes and dropped the crackers inside, had jammed. A red light was flashing, and crackers were piling up on the belt like snow. "If we don't get it running in an hour," Wanjiru said, mostly to herself, "we'll miss the trucks."

The maintenance technician was off sick, and nobody else knew the machine. Wanjiru opened the manual, but it was in German and thirty years old. Then she noticed something she had never seen before: inside the door of the machine, someone had written a name and a phone number in black marker. "K. Osterhagen. If it jams, call me."

She looked at the clock. It was ten past three. You can't call a stranger at this hour, she thought. Then she looked at the crackers piling up and dialed the number on a video call.

After six rings, an old man in a striped bathrobe appeared on the screen, with his glasses pushed up on his forehead. "Osterhagen," he said. Wanjiru apologized and explained. He didn't seem annoyed. If anything, he looked delighted. "Is it the green one? Show me the red light."

For forty minutes, he talked her through it. "If you open the side panel, you'll see a silver arm. There should be a cracker stuck behind it. Pull it out gently. Now turn off the power, count to ten and turn it back on." The first time, the machine shook and stopped again. The second time, Wanjiru found a second broken cracker hidden behind the sensor. She blew the crumbs away, closed the panel and pressed the green button. The machine coughed, rattled and started folding boxes as if nothing had happened.

"I installed that machine in 1994," Mr. Osterhagen said, smiling. "I always told them it would outlive me." Then he hung up and, Wanjiru guessed, went back to bed.

The trucks left at 5:58. Before the boxes were loaded, Wanjiru had taken a blue marker. On the side of the first box, she had drawn a small cracker with a little face and the words "Thank you, Mr. O." She took a photo of it and sent it to the number inside the machine door.