Half Past Midnight

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Doomsday fell on a Saturday.

I was at work. But then, I was always at work, or at least that was how it seemed. I didn’t know at the time just how easy I had it.

In those days, I was a CNC machinist and programmer. I worked in a small, family-owned, high-volume, high-precision machine shop. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? The key words there are “family owned,” and the family that owned this particular business was the Dawcett family. It was, not so coincidentally, my family.

I was the only son of Raymond and Elizabeth Dawcett, owner and office manager, respectively. That effectively gave me the unofficial title of S.O.B., supposedly standing for “Son of the Boss,” but some of the employees used it a bit too gleefully.

That particular Saturday morning, I was tweaking the setup on a CNC lathe to run an extremely close-tolerance job. It was a tricky setup, requiring all of my concentration. On a weekday, there would be all the myriad distractions that come with Monday through Friday’s nine to five. So I had come in on Saturday.

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