Kludge International

I was looking for a small mechanical part of some sort - I don't really remember what it was. The store I was directed to turned out to be in a long tubular building. I had to climb stairs to get to the door and when it opened, it detached entirely from the building and fell to one side. I walked in and realized that the building was actually a commercial jet liner, with many of the seats replaced by racks of parts for sale.

It turned out that kludge owned the place. I should have guessed that from the very beginning. He owned the airport, too; he had bought it cheaply because it was a fixer-upper. He wanted to get it operational again. Everything was decrepit and in need of repair. There were a bunch of scruffy-looking guys hanging around and fixing things.

I looked at a candy machine in the terminal building. It was held together with spanner-type security screws, the kind where you need a special screwdriver with two pins the right distance apart in order to drive them. There was one of the special screwdrivers, brand new and still in its plastic bag, sitting on the floor under the machine. It was the wrong size. Someone had wanted to break into the machine, which was broken anyway, but had been stopped because they didn't have the proper screwdriver. Kludge asked me if I had the right screwdriver to fix the machine, and where he should go to buy one, and I said I didn't, and I wanted a set of security screwdrivers myself and would have thought he'd be the one to ask where to buy them.

There were two young women in the terminal, wearing silly-looking aprons with the logo of a defunct airline on them. They were waitresses. Kludge explained that the FAA would take away his certification if he didn't have a fully operational coffee shop on the premises at all times, so he had to keep the waitresses employed even without any customers to serve.