February 27 - Accident Free

Rhonda Peterson did a double take at the digital sign near the foreman's office in the warehouse: Accident free since September 23, 2009.
The date that day was September 21, 2009.
Once she had triple-checked that that day was in fact the 21st and that therefore the 23rd hadn't happened yet, she asked her foreman if the sign was wrong. He told her it must have been, but he didn't have time to look into it. She asked other people around the warehouse what the deal with the sign was, but nobody seemed interested.
A superstitious woman, Rhonda called in sick on the 23rd.
On that day, two things happened. Buzz Stallwell broke his ankle falling down the stairs near the break room, and the digital sign reset itself: Acccident free since November 15, 2009.
She wanted to point out to her co-workers that the sign had more or less predicted the accident that had occured on the 23rd, but she was afraid of what people would think about her. So instead, she again asked people what the deal with the sign was. A few people humored her and looked at it, but they wouldn't commit to saying anything substantive about it. They mostly frowned and shrugged.
"Yeah, that's weird" was about all anyone would say.
November 15 came, and Rhonda took a personal day.
When she went back to work on the 16th, she learned that on the previous day Maria Hernandez had broken her wrist in a press accident.
Rhonda looked at the sign. It had reset itself for January 4, 2010. This time she took a picture.
On January 4, Rhonda took an extra vacation day.
She returned to work on the 5th to hear that on the previous day Pete Anders had dislocated shoulder as a result of slipping on the ice around back near the dumpsters.
The sign near the foreman's office was now set for February 20, 2010.
Rhonda showed the pictures she had taken of the Accident free since January 4, 2o10 version of the sign to Dale Patterson, her foreman, but he just looked at her like she was crazy, which Rhonda knew she was not. Then she asked him who set the machine's Accident free since date, but he didn't know and nobody else seemed to either. The best anybody could come up with was that it set itself automatically. This made no sense to Rhonda, but didn't seem to bother anyone else.
What's more, nobody even knew where the sign had come from. It was just there and had been there as long as anyone could remember. Whoever had installed it was long gone.
With extreme caution, she looked closely at the sign and found the name of its manufacturer: Hargrove Electronics, Bristol Tennessee.
Nothing on Google.
Next to nothing anywhere on the Internet.
The only thing she found was an article from a 1989 archived edition of the Bristol Monitor saying how the Hargrove Electronics factory was closing down and going out of business.
During the days leading up to February 20, she broached the sign with a few of her friends, but she felt too stupid to put the hard sell on them. An electronic sign that could predict when the next accident would happen was something out of Stephen King. It was ridiculous, obviously it was ridiculous.
And yet . . .
February 2oth came. Rhonda called in sick and did research while Cindy Merchant broke her arm in the break room, and the sign reset itself for March 1, 2010.
Rhonda took a week off in late February and traveled to Bristol, Tennessee where it took her a lot of asking around--and a lot of suspicious looks from the locals--before she found the address for Hargrove Electronics. She drove out there in her rented car, but it was long gone. Burned down, from the looks of the lot. There wasn't much there but weeds, rubble, and blackened cinder blocks.
Most people in town wouldn't talk about it; the best she could cobble together from the bits and pieces of people things would say was that Hargrove Electronics had been the town's primary employer through much of the 80s, but it had gone out of business when it had to do a massive recall of its flagship product, the Accident free since ____ signs which were defective. Nobody could tell her in what way they were defective, and nobody could tell her what ever became of the owner of the company or why nobody else ever built on the land where Hargrove Electronics had once stood or if it even had in fact burned down. Nobody told her much of anything.
Rhonda went back to work that Monday and told Dale that she quit. The sign creeped her out and she didn't want to work there anymore, plain and simple. She felt bad not giving him two weeks' notice, but she'd made up her mind.
She cleaned out her locker, said goodbye to everyone, and headed for the door. Just before she got there, she turned around to flip off the sign, but she noticed that it had reset itself for April 18, 2010.
And that's the last thing she ever saw.