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From Chris Young, Toymaker/Producer:

Tripod is in a factory.

They make cable on the two floors below us. We make Internet up here.

We can hear their big loud machines. They can hear our loud cursing when computers crash.

Anyway, I worked in another factory a few years ago.

It was a chemical plant that made peroxides and other things that blow up.

This is the story of Chris (that's me) and the Emergency Shut-Down.

I was just out of college, and living at home with mommy and daddy while I "figured out what to do next." The factory job paid a couple bucks over minimum wage because it was sorta technical, and it was a night shift. It was a temp thing — about five months' work. It was located about ten minutes outside of my little sleepy upstate New York hometown. The plant was pretty big — about 40 buildings spread over an area about as big as a giant shopping mall.

My official title was "Unit Technician." My job was to tend the sludge tanks in a building that cleaned the toxic stuff out of the waste water from the rest of the factory. My building was all by itself, way out at the far end of the plant. From 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. I was in charge of the sludge, and I was the only person in that building on the overnight shift. A lot of the other buildings had regular staff, because the machines that make the chemicals never really shut down.

It was a pretty cushy job. Every two hours I had to make my rounds and measure the temperature, pH, and oxygen content in all the sludge tanks, using little electronic gadgets. I majored in chemistry in college, but even a psych major could have done it. Doing this took about 45 minutes, so then I just had to entertain myself and sorta keep an eye on the sludge for the other hour and 15 minutes. Then I repeated the process over and over again until the sun came up. At some point I would head over to the cafeteria building and eat my lunch, because food was not allowed in any other building.

I steadily worked my way through a huge stash of about five years' worth of People magazines in my building's office. For a while I knew LOTS of celebrity trivia. I also listened to a lot of weird late-night a.m. radio call-in shows. And like the smart*** college grad that I was, I would call up the local college radio station and make requests for them to play Sonic Youth or The Dead Kennedys, "...for me and all the guys out here at the chemical plant." I imagined that I was giving the late-night DJs a thrill: "Man — those guys are pretty hip out there at that chemical plant!"

Yep. I was all by myself, working this weird night-shift job that I figured was kinda below me, but also kinda cool too. (Hey — I was a jerky kid just outta college. Waddayawant?)

Anyway... I had to go through a whole lot of safety training at the beginning of the job. I had to wear a hard hat and steel-toed boots on the job, and there was a special phone number that I was supposed to dial in case of an emergency. When you dialed the number, calls automatically went to the fire department, the sheriff, all the plant managers, and ALL 40 buildings were automatically shut down. It was a big deal.

So one night I was sitting there at around 3:30 a.m. reading all about Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, when I heard a buzzer going off in the next room. I got up and went into the sludge room. There was some sort of siren going off in there. I ran out the back door to check on the other sludge tanks, and there was a big siren screaming right outside the back door. Then I ran around to the front of the building and there was a huge strobe light mounted on a tall pole flashing at full-speed and spinning around.

So I figured it was probably an emergency.

So I dialed the emergency phone number.

In about a minute, there were five pickup trucks flying out to my building to see what was about to explode. All these plant managers jumped out of their trucks and ran around trying to figure out what was going on.

After another minute, one more truck pulled up. It was one of the repair technicians. He came over to me and said "Didn't someone tell you that all the alarms in this building are screwy?! We're getting them all fixed. You're supposed to ignore any alarms that go off tonight!"

Oops.

The guy on the shift before me forgot to tell me that little tid-bit.

Ignore all alarms.

I would have remembered that.

I could see that the head manager was trying really hard to contain his frustration/fury/amazement. He was just barely able to rasp out: "W e l l ,   b e t t e r   s a f e   t h a n   s o r r y . . .  s o n . . ."

They called off the sheriff and the fire department. All of the managers and the repair guy got back into their trucks and drove away. They didn't fire me, but I think I got a note in my permanent file.

After that, whenever I went down to the cafeteria for lunch, it seemed like I was sort of the center of attention. These older, rough-neck factory guys would look over at me, and then mutter and chuckle amongst themselves. I had a neighbor who worked the day shift, and he assured me that my reputation had been sealed as: "that goofy college kid who shut it all down."

The job ended about six or seven weeks after that. They let me keep the hard hat.

—Chris, Toymaker/Producer (11/20/98)

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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