dump truck dialogue

[sideways]

Title: Dump Truck Dialogue
Rating: G
Genre: Sci-fi (loosely)
Wordcount: 476 
Remarks: origfic_bingo prompt - abandonment 

There was always someone who didn’t shut their junk down properly, and at least once a month there was guaranteed to be some thoughtless idiot who even neglected to turn the damn voice off. The first time an unexpected question had echoed out from the back, she’d nearly jumped a mile—not as much a figure of speech as she’d like, given that the truck had scraped pretty hard along the guard railing before she’d jerked it back to the centre of the road.

Once she’d been on the job a little longer, gotten used to the fact people were sloppy and lazy, it had almost been fun. Driving back and forth from the city to the dump was not exactly thrilling business, and you could start to welcome anything that broke up the routine. An appliance that asked you three times every half hour whether or not you felt like something to eat was pushing it, particularly when you hadn’t had your lunch yet, but the ones that came with broader conversational options could be a real source of entertainment.

She’d struck up a great rapport with a thermostat once. It was a surprisingly cheeky little thing, first making some offhand observation about the weather and then moving on to what proved to be a hilarious understanding of innuendo. The words it knew, it had to have been installed in a bedroom. They spent most of the two hour trip flinging sly remarks and counters back and forth, and she drove home with a smile on her face and a solid welcome for her husband.

Alarm clocks tended to be bossy, and that was no surprise—the only thing worse was a speedometer or, horror above all horrors, some sort of personal fitness device. TVs were by far the best, especially if their user had had a similar list of favourite shows to her. Sometimes she thought she’d like to spend a trip with a PDA or a phone, but of course those went through much quicker, more thorough channels. Security measures and all that. Total waste of what would be hours and hours of gossip, though.

There was only one question that ruined the mood, even more so than a food-obsessed fridge or a set of scales that liked to make snotty estimates based on how she braked. (She had a great big pile of metal stacked in the back, of course the truck handled heavily!) Even if she was inclined to take the time and seriously try to explain the answer to them, they wouldn’t get it. They couldn’t get it. They weren’t allowed to.

“When will I be retrieved?”

Only two real ways to respond to that, and because she didn’t feel like deviating from her schedule to hop out and disable the speech unit, she usually just turned the radio up.