Monday, January 21, 1991
Nick sits in a section of the wide hallways in the Tech building, in the rear part near the mechanical equipment labs such as hydraulics, testing, machining, and things he hasn’t needed to see. This is known as the smokers' lounge being one of the few indoor spots on campus designated to allow it, such as the snack bar beneath Gelding hall and he's noticed that some of the mech labs allow smoking as well, by default, given the open, ventilated space.
No lines or anything demarcate the smokers' lounge, it's evidently an honor system. Maybe you have to be within normal conversation distance of the chairs. That works.
There's one other occupant a few chairs away quietly reading a paper that someone left, no telling how old it is. Cork boards with announcements that Nick hardly reads are along the wall that heads to the front door, about 200 feet away. From this corner he can see the heart of the engineering technology labs, as his EET labs are to his left down the shorter hall toward another side corridor.
There's a snack machine and one of those Servomation hot beverage deals, the coffee had always smelled good so he gets a cup, it's 5:45 PM and he'll be around till almost 9. One of the required labs meets once per week for 4 hours and it's self-paced, so one is free to take a break whenever it seems best.
After a full quarter under the belt he's gotten a good taste of world life. Many of the folks in his GS classes are close to finishing up their degree, some working on two degrees. Seems it's about 4:1 non-traditional students, those who had been 10, 15, 20 or more years in a career and starting over, or else laid off from one of the nearby factories and getting incentives to pursue here.
This is when you realize all the things that adults never told you before. Most of the women talk about their families and come across as motherly or sisterly, at least to a young green fellow. Others make it clear they would be a sure thing, tell of their exploits with male 'friends', how some of the reciprocating machine tools remind them of a porn pic someone had brought in to work with the same model machine rigged with a phallus.
To a high degree, the men are worldly and inspiring, in a lab situation they make one believe we can solve any technical problem that comes along. Quick with a joke and have been around, been there, albeit, sometimes offering advice no one asks for. Then there are some that look like they crawled out from beneath a rock or wondered out of the hills and can't find their way back.
Is this is what it's really like at Dad's plant? Some of them had worked there.
One of the non-trads had come to tech writing class in a suit, been interviewing but not finding much success, surprising to Nick since Dwight seemed like the cream of the crop: seasoned, confident, hard working, dependable; the affable yet capable everyman with qualities that seem unattainable. It's tempting to think that this is the way it will be: cold weather, cold world, few opportunities.
Nick is thankful for the ones that are about his own age, since he was an oddity in his high school it's refreshing to be funneled in with those more like-minded, granted, a lot of them have a more rural and farming background.
So he sits at the apex, leaning back, the halls converging at each end, one where he entered, one where he'll be for a while, then eventually, somewhere where the long hall's lines finally intersect, he'll start whatever. Wherever.
This is not some prestigious back-east institution whose importance never made sense to Nick. A school is a school. People are realizing their fulfillment here, some bound for leadership or other high-functioning occupations, at a school founded in the latter 20th century as the result of legislative action.
Yet the halls are timeless. Names and dates on the corkboard change, the walls go on.
The stories these walls could tell. They go on.
At unseen hours there must be crews that sweep these floors. They go on.
The perpetual fluorescent lighting which seems purposefully too dim for much reading, and sometimes you'll see folks nodding off through here, Nick has never seen those shut off, and he hates that this has to share image space with Orwell's Minitrue.
Nevertheless, It goes on.
The stories told in and around these chairs, god how they go on. And on.
At work this past weekend, an affable fellow, Lucas, who's engaged to one of Nick's coworkers said he'd heard they were enlisting the draft, which he had half-believed. During a half-hour mid shift lunch Nick walked to Taco Bell, then while venturing through a quiet parking lot through a light snow had visions of riding in a transport truck with other GIs. It has the allure of adventure, to a point, but not the life for him. They hadn't even deployed Tim's unit yet, and was almost sure they don't conscript all siblings.
This didn't stick in his mind long, especially after the positive press over the weekend, SCUDS v. Patriots, seems there always has to be conflict in the world. It goes on.
The small cup of coffee has gone from sips to gulps to empty. Time to empty the bladder and get back to wire wrapping. Thankfully, for now, it goes on.