Grumble - Walk Softly and Carry a Bulky Laser

The summer adventures of Fish and Oy!

A recollection by Fish, with help from Oy!

For most youths, a summer job involves flipping burgers, waiting tables, or selling clothes. For Oy! and I, the four summers in that span between high school and real life instead involved red tape. Making it. Lots of it.

If you've ever been to a university, you'll note that it keeps track of its important and expensive items, usually with a little tag or sticker attached to the item reading, "Property of Wassamatta U." and an ID number. Somewhere, some university bureaucrat is keeping track of which things are where. At a state university, though, it goes to a whole new level -- because the school is beholden to the taxpayers, and has to account for every dollar it spends.

Our local university, being a state university, therefore has its inventory control heavily computerized, each item bearing a little bar code (like a UPC symbol) on its tag, with all this information fed into a colossal, centrally-run database at the state capitol. And each summer, the university would send out its "Property Control workers" (or, as we were more commonly albeit derisively known, "the Inventory kids") out into the field to go find out where each item was, and what condition it was in.

To do so we were armed with our tools of the trade: a giant printout of the entire database, itemized by building number, room number, and department code -- and a portable scanning laser, the kind you now see at every retail store in the country but which were still fairly arcane back during the administration of George the First. And out we'd trudge, looking like a cross between Imperial Stormtroopers and 1970's computer nerds. Which, now that I think of it, is a good metaphor for the job. Or at least, how Oy! and I treated the job.

The Food Chain

Universities have a well-defined hierarchy, with almighty professors at the top, administration in the middle, and janitorial and maintenance staff at the bottom. We, as summer help, came below everybody. Even among summer workers, we were the least loved; the painters, dorm cleaners, and groundskeepers were at least serving a visibly necessary function. We, meanwhile, were just a bunch of students bugging people for some stupid bureaucratic nonsense.

Our program was based out of Physical Plant (itself already low on the full-time totem pole, you'll note, since it's the HQ for maintenance), and even there we were made to feel like good-for-nothings. As at any office, but especially an academic one, the employees each carved out their own little fiefdom, and we disrupted the Physical Plant's school-year pattern. One day, a Physical Plant secretary spent the whole day with steam coming out of her ears because someone had dared to stir their coffee with the sugar bowl spoon. Can you imagine such a crime? As summer interlopers, we were held responsible, and she gave us furtile, baleful glances for a week -- despite the fact that none of us drank the office's coffee.

The Mission

You'd think the work would be pretty straightforward. Items like desktop computers shouldn't move around too often, and certainly whoever used to own it would know where it went. And the database would delete any item that went unfound for two years in a row, so the really old or long-vanished stuff shouldn't be on our list at all.

But forget not that we were working for a state bureaucracy. If you think all the campus' ducks were in order, we have a Monroe calculator we'd like to sell you. Cheap.

Case #1: Monroe Calculators

Monroe was a big manufacturer of desktop calculators in the 1960's, back when a calculator was the size of a box of Grape-Nuts, instead of being a bonus feature they add to digital watches and cell phones. Now, the University had a price cutoff for the Inventory project: $500. Anything worth less than $500 to replace would not be on our list. But aha, the University also had a standard formula for really old equipment to determine its replacement cost -- a formula that assumed an annual rate of inflation for all items. Which meant that a calculator that cost $200 in 1968, and which had been long since rendered obsolete, was now "worth" $600 to replace -- and we had to find it. And for whatever reason, there were hundreds of these little electronic bastards still in the database, though most had clearly been gone for far more than two years. Many a department assistant would stare at us blankly as we asked to please see the Monroe relics. We might just as well have asked the Physics department to show us their slide rules and phlogiston tanks.

Case #2: It's Part of the Landscape... Or Not

Also worth more than $500 to replace were plenty of items that no person, no matter how clever, would be able to steal. (Well, maybe us, but we had more free time than the full-time employees.) For instance, always on the list were the air intake fans, boilers, and other equipment that provide the various buildings with air and heat. Unsurprisingly, the department assistants and professors rarely had access to their buildings' roofs and basements, so we'd have to go bother a Physical Plant guy who clearly had more important things to do, like play pool in the Physical Plant break room.

Remember how we said that items that went unfound for two years disappeared off the lists? Every year, when inventorying the gym equipment, we'd be responsible for finding the two football goalposts. One hitch: the University did not have a football team. Had never had one, in fact. There had never, ever been football goalposts on the athletic fields, though the records sure indicated the Phys Ed department had bought them. Somewhere in Aruba, a former gym employee is laughing his head off and drinking piña coladas.

Case #3: Shouldn't the Head Be Starting to Rot?

People buy some weird stuff with University money. People buy some weird, expensive stuff with University money, and it gets entered into the database. We soon learned that no matter how odd the database entry, the item probably was there, and probably had a good explanation. Like, say, "HEAD OF SHAKESPEARE, LARGE", which was, in fact, a two-meter tall plaster head of Shakespeare in the Library's reading room. Or the "VIBRATOR, CONCRETE", which, alas, turned out to be a piece of construction equipment. Or the room full of magnetic marbles, Lego sets, and other toys, which the Physics department claimed were for educational purposes.

Case #4: Everything AND the Kitchen Sink

Our job: to inventory the office of a professor in the Arts department. Our heads: bitten clean off upon attempting same.

Turns out that said professor had a decent explanation for her axe-grinding. Every year we'd come to her office and would run down the list of things we were looking for, and among that list would always be a "sink". And there was clearly no sink in her current office.

...but there was one in her previous office. A little investigation dug up the truth: it seems that when she moved, some bureaucrat went into the database and simply transferred all the assets that were assigned to her from her old location to her new one. Her computer? Now in the new location. Her printer? Now in the new location. The sink? Not so much.

Case #5: We Get the Last Word

While we were low on the food chain, let us not forget that we were also bureaucrats. The heavy hammer of stupidity and the binding quality of red tape were ours to wield. (As Too Much Joy put it, "Making fun of bums... bad karma thing to do.") Science professors tended to be the most contemptuous of the "Inventory kids", since they had important research to conduct that we were interrupting. Worst of the lab-coat set was one I'll call Prof. Schneiderman. Schneiderman was legendary around our office for his fire-spitting unwillingness to let us anywhere near any of his equipment ever ever ever. His name became Inventory slang: "Be careful; the English department can be touchy and we don't need another Schneiderman."

Two weeks after Schneiderman nearly disemboweled Oy! during an ill-fated inventory attempt, a purchase order came across our boss' desk: Schneiderman had just bought a new computer. When we called to make an appointment to put an inventory tag on it, he informed us he'd taken it home for use in his study.

Aha! Red tape to the rescue! For you see, the dear professor had failed to fill out a Form B. No Form B! No Form B! No form saying "I am taking this asset off-campus!" Sandy, our boss (and to this day still our personal hero), informed Prof. Schneiderman that without a proper Form B to account for the item's absence, the asset would be considered missing or stolen. A very humiliated Schneiderman had to bring the computer back to his office and wait for us to examine it, record its serial number, place the scan-tag on it, and collect his Form B. Victory was ours.

The Lessons

Still, we have to admit that despite the hassles, we got to see some pretty cool stuff over the years, like the incinerator in the back of the East Gym where they dispose of the lab rats, or the Theater department costume shop ("Look at how many fezzes they've got!"). Or the 55-gallon drums of water that the Chemistry department had taken out of the building's bomb shelter, sawed in half, and turned into trash cans, a weird sort of post-Cold War utilitarianism. Or the working harpsichord, on which Fish played some Mozart.

Some places weren't as exciting as we'd hoped, like the University pub, closed over the summer, and depressingly devoid of any goods of merit -- instead only a bottle of Grenadine, several cans of soda, and an open bag of stale pretzel nuggets. (Guess which items remained after we'd inventoried the room.) Or the University president's office, which looked pretty much like any other department head's office, save for the... fold-out couch. (Which we inventoried.)

And some places were surprisingly disturbing, like the office of one ill-tempered music professor which we wisely chose to inventory while he was out. Not knowing that his desk phone, rather than make a ringing sound like, well, every other phone on the entire planet, instead calls out "You have a telephone call!" -- thus scaring the living bejeezus out of the Inventory people skulking around the room at the time. Or the biology labs, otherwise innocuous until you pop into one room and find a grad student busily cutting open a monkey skull.

And we learned that the bathrooms in the basement of the Lecture Hall have motion detectors connected to the lights, to conserve energy. So that if you are Fish, and you are waiting for Oy! to finish his business, you will, after a few minutes, hear a startled cry followed by a loud thump -- as Oy!, now sitting on the can in pitch blackness, throws his shoe at the bathroom sink in hopes of triggering the motion detector without having to get up.

And we learned that a hand-held laser was a great toy, especially when campus tours would go by; we would walk up to trees, run the laser over their bark, stare at the display with concerned expressions, and then stage-whisper something about "infestation". Not that the devices were wholly reliable; one day, a co-worker's laser started getting hot. Really hot. Really, really hot. Enough to visibly melt and deform the thick plastic casing. Needless to say, the silicon guts didn't survive the inferno.

But as a summer job, it really had its perks. We were never in the same place more than twice (we'd visit each room once on the first search, and once more on the "find the stuff we couldn't find the first time" sweep); we were out and about, walking around a lot during the height of summer; and most importantly our bosses were nowhere near us. As long as we were making a demonstrable effort to find the items, we were doing our job; for our bosses, ignorance was bliss. So we could, hypothetically, stop in at one of the campus' many computer rooms and check our e-mail, or hypothetically take breaks whenever we felt like it. (Surprisingly, I only remember napping once in the four-year stretch -- which was certainly a better work ethic than that of the summer painters, who napped openly and unashamedly in the lobby of the Arts building.)

Indeed, as the years went on, it actually became in our best interest to waste time. We were hired for a set number of weeks over the summer, yet our job contained a finite amount of work: two sweeps of campus. As the years went by, we became better and better and our jobs, and could do it more efficiently. What would happen if we finished early? In all likelihood, we'd get canned, so the University could show how it had cut costs. Our reward for faster work would be less money (ah, bureaucracy, thy name is Irony.) So by mid-July, over lunch, we'd all whisper an alarmed, "Everybody slow down!" For Oy! and I, "checking e-mail" turned into "checking e-mail and Usenet", and we learned the location of every out-of-the-way vending machine on campus.

So if you work for a university, or a large corporation, or anyone keeping regular track of their assets, be nice to the Inventory kids. Because they have a lot of free time on their hands, and they know who's naughty and who's nice -- and they, for one, will raise an eyebrow when you can't cough up the goalposts.

And they have the Form B's.