I went to New York this weekend, which was fun and very eventful in so many ways. I’ve never spent so many consecutive hours in Brooklyn. It was good. Real good.
Along the way there and back we drove past a lot of smokestacks and HAZMAT trucks. When I was in college I lived very close to a smokestack. I think it was a test smokestack that was used for industrial engineers. My college had a lot of test things. There was a test coal power plant for engineers, a test barn for animal scientists, a test farm for agriculturalists, a test brewery for food scientists, a test radio for communicators, a test court room for lawyers, and even a test horse that was impregnated and had its fetus aborted every semester for practice by veterinarians. I always felt bad for that horse. It seemed like an awful job.
Anyway, I took a lot of photos of that smokestack on my way to class the whole year I lived in that apartment. I thought I was arty and capturing the grim reality of our industrial world. Really, I just wasted a lot of film. They were terrible pictures and I didn’t know how to read a light meter.
Then I remembered how this graduate student I used to work with, Marcus, used to work on a smokestack before he was a graduate student. Marcus said it was the absolute worst job in the world. He had to climb to the top of this smokestack and monitor all of the chemicals that came out of it. He had to sit up at the very top on a very uncomfortable chair, and hold electrodes into the smoke. He never got a break because he had a few dozen chemicals to monitor, and each electrode was for a different chemical, and by the time he was done monitoring all the chemicals it was time to start over and get a new reading for the first chemical. He had to sit up there the entire time the factory was running, which was 14 hours.
Even if he could have had a lunch break, he wouldn’t have been able to eat it because he had to wear a gasmask the whole time he was up there. Marcus said he had the worst suntan lines ever because his nose, mouth, and chin never saw the sun the entire summer, but he was also at the top of a smokestack where there isn’t much shade. The first day he didn’t wear a hat, and all the skin on his ear got fried and came off in one, big, scaly, bloody piece. He said it was gross. Real gross.
Then I remembered a distant family member of mine who went to Georgia Tech and wrote a computer program and designed a new electrode to monitor the chemicals that come out of smokestacks. I presume he spent a lot of time at the test smokestack at Georgia Tech thinking about how to make Marcus’ life easier. He wrote up his program really nice and neat, and put his electrode in a pretty box, and ended up selling it to the government for $400 million. He was 24.
I think it’s good that Marcus went to graduate school because there is probably a very expensive computer program doing his old job right now.
I give smokestacks a score of 56,546 out of 100,000.
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