Like a Cyclone

Reminiscing on Offices of Old...

Spontaneous fire or heat stroke were real concerns for my staff and I the first summer that we worked in the woodshop which had rather suddenly and clumsily been transformed into our GEAR UP office at the middle school. It was a hundred and ten degrees in San Fernando Valley. We could feel the heat radiating from the cement floors. The room came equipped with a swamp cooler but no air conditioning. Sweat dripped from our foreheads as we tried to work so naturally, we pondered our options for relief.

As the newly christened “boss” of the office, I politely asked the school plant manager for a fan. It wasn’t a request for the cure to cancer or for someone to move the sun out of its orbit. It was just a simple request for a fan.

After an aggressive argument over whether or not the school even owned a fan anymore, the plant manager begrudgingly brought me the “only fan” that he said he could find.

The “only fan” was literally the size of my fist and I was fairly certain that if I pursed my lips and blew, more air would come out of me than out of that fan. Upon demonstrating that fact to the plant manager, he wiped the spit spray from his face and took away the “only fan."

He returned with a blue Boeing 757 Jet Engine.

A moment of concern crossed my face as he plugged the contraption into the wall, but before I could voice my prediction…..WHOOOOSH... I was right in the middle of an indoor hurricane. Several screams echoed around the room as my staff and I began to chase important documents around the room. "CAN WE TURN IT DOWN?" I breathlessly asked the plant manager.

"WHAT?" He yelled back.

"DOWN... CAN WE TURN IT DOWN? I hollered. He shrugged and flipped the switch off. A moment of peace ensued.

"Can we turn it down?" I asked again in a normal tone as the papers that were dancing among the currents of the storm settled to the floor.

"That is down," he replied.

"It is either on,” he clicked the switch and whoosh, the room pushed up into a spin again, “or off.” He clicked the switch again. The room flittered to a soft landing.

“Hah,” he chuckled, “That is it." As he left, he added, “Like I told you, you could always use the swamp cooler.” He nodded to the monster of a machine which hung precariously over my desk.

Seriously, our options were an indoor hurricane or the swamp cooler. If you have ever owned a swamp cooler then you know that they are the farthest substitute for an air conditioner you can find other than the shade of a tree. The only way to get it cold enough to make a difference in a room’s temperature is if you turn it on in the middle of the night.

Even if someone in our office sacrificed sleep to drive to work and turn it on at three in the morning, when the monster kicked into gear, it shook uncontrollably, spit rocks, and made a sound- eeer caaa eeer caaa- that fostered a feeling of impending doom. The sound was exactly like that of an approaching Tyrannosaurus Rex from the movie "Jurassic Park". When the darn thing was active, we were all in a constant state of suspense.

We weren’t sure if the heat or the suspense were literally going to kill us, and so we ultimately invested in rocks and megaphones before resolving to turn our office into the set of a Beyonce MTV video. Like a Cyclone.