– In which Dorn spins a work yarn.
This might be my best work story. It has all the elements of a blockbuster: sex, drugs, crime, UFOs, and my legendarily messy office at work. And it is ALL TRUE.
I call this story “I was a fugitive from the NCIS“. (Well okay, maybe the title isn’t literally true.)
Once upon a time, long before you were born, back in the 1990’s, I was the Environmental Coordinator for a Navy Base that will remain unnamed.
Back then, the government actually cared about environmental protection, and they were tired of corporate executives pointing fingers at each other so that no one person could be held responsible for environmental violations happening at their chemical factories and such. So they wrote environmental laws in a way that always identified an individual who could be held responsible for non-compliance. In the Navy, every base had a person who was responsible for on-site environmental compliance. This position is officially called the Environmental Coordinator, or by the fellowship of those who held the job, the “Designated Jailee”.
That was my job, and one thing you learn very quickly in that position is that you document everything you do and say. I would fill notebooks with notes of all my conversations and decisions every day. I used up lab notebooks at about a dozen times my usage rate when I was a scientist. I tried to get all my staff to be just as diligent, so between all these notes, and the reams of official records we were required to keep, we generated an enormous amount of environmental documentation.
The was back when the paperless office wasn’t even a pipe dream, and environmental documentation meant paper. Lots of it. Coping with these amounts of paper was quite a challenge, and I wasn’t much better at organizing paper back then than I am now. (If you’d ever gone to my office (aka “the Superfund site” ha ha), or seen my home office, you know what I mean.) And on top of all the stuff I and my staff generated every day, we had all the official and unofficial records of my predecessors in the job. We had a large documents room at least as big as our offices.
In the late nineties, Congress took steps to shut down a number of Navy bases around the country (which is another interesting story, though not as interesting as this one), and our base made the hit list. Hundreds of scientists who worked there were transferred to Missouri, but I and my staff were trimmed and repurposed, to stay on site and prepare the base to be cleaned up, closed down, and the real estate transferred off the Navy rolls. This included finding and disposing of all the hazardous chemicals left behind by the expelled researchers, cleaning up the outdoor sites where chemical spills or dumping had occurred over the past 50 years, and preparing and organizing all of the environmental documentation spanning the life of the base.
It wasn’t hard for me to figure out that organizing all that paperwork was beyond the capacity of me and my skeleton crew, so we hired a professional document-organizing firm to come in and get all the records ship-shape. The company sent down a couple of box wranglers, and a young woman who would be the on-site manager of all the work the company did.
She was in charge of determining the overall organization of the files, so we’d spend some time together talking about what the records in various boxes were about and how they fit with other records. These were friendly, sometimes far-ranging chats, and in one of these she confided that she firmly believed that UFOs existed and the official records of them were being kept hidden from us. OK, I thought, to each his own, maybe there’s a reason she likes a career poking around in musty old document archives. By this point the Navy base was mostly abandoned, and one took one’s social interactions where one could get them.
I was doing a walkaround of the base one afternoon, and I went to check out how the work in the document room was going. It looked much like it had looked when the work started, but maybe the contents of each box was better organized and indexed now.
But the place reeked of pot smoke. Maybe it was the document organizer, or her crew, or perhaps a disgruntled lone scientist not yet whisked off to Missouri, sneaking a smoke in this mostly undisturbed corner of the base. I didn’t bother pursuing it–by this point, we few left on the base were starting to feel a bit like a desperate lawless band of survivors, abandoned by the rest of humanity and waiting to die (organizationally speaking).
One evening the file manager and I were working late, and she started talking casually about some esoterica of the files I had been keeping. But her voice and expression were odd, and she was kind of sidling up to me conspiratorially. It was only on the drive home that it hit me, slow that I am, that my God! She was coming on to me! I’d better avoid working late alone for a while!
CONTINUED in part 2 . . .