Memoirs of a Visual Man
(continued)
By R.S. Lindsay

Usually, they shook their heads, looking at me the way you'd look at someone who walked into the room with a dead coyote tied around his neck. Then they would make a quick U-turn, and dashed back out the door without saying a word. One or two of these venturesome young fellows dared to ask questions:

"What are you doing?"

"What does it LOOK like I'm doing? I'm showing a film!"

"In the restroom?!"

"It's a special showing."

"For who? There's no one here!"

"I know that! I'm showing it for the toilets in the stalls back there!"

"You're showing a movie for the toilets in the stalls?"

"That's right."

"Are they watching it?"

"I assume so."

"Do they like the movie?"

"I don't know. They haven't told me yet."

"Have you asked them?"

"YOU ask them. I don't talk to strange toilets."

"But you show movies for them?"

"Yes, that's right."

These conversations tended to be rather short in length, and my inquisitors usually left very quickly, as if they had suddenly remembered some urgent appointment. Once in the middle of this ordeal, two little old ladies, probably secretaries from the nearby offices, pushed open the restroom door and peeked in from the hall, with bewildered expressions on their faces. I gave them a pleasant smile.

"Would you like to come in, ladies? It's a very educational film."

They slammed the door shut, without replying.

After 20 minutes, which seemed to last three hours, the film ended. I rewound the film, returned it to its canister, and packed up the projector. When I came out into the hall, I found a small crowd of people waiting for me, engaged in hush-whispered conversations about the man who was showing a film in the Men’s Restroom. The whispers gave way to an eerie silence, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea as I pushed the projection cart down the hall. Everyone was watching me, perhaps waiting to see if I would go next door to the Ladies's Restroom and show a film there. But I merely returned the projector and film to the audio-visual cabinet and left Patterson Building as fast as I could.

As I came out the door of Patterson Building, I passed two uniformed members of the Campus Police, who were hurrying into the building, no doubt to investigate a report of strange behavior by an audio-visual projectionist in the Men's Restroom. If I had been five minutes later getting out of there, I have little doubt that, later that day, I would have made a phone call to the Audio-Visual Department asking them to come bail me out of the hoosegow. As it was, I hastened across campus to my next A/V assignment. For the rest of the time I worked for the A/V Department, I never found out which of my supervisors insisted that I show a film in the Mens' Restroom of Patterson Building. To date, no person or group has claimed responsibility.

ONCE MORE DOWN THE HATCH

Crank assignments, though often humiliating, were infrequent. Day-to-day technical problems with the A/V equipment provided a more regular migraine. For daily excitement, there were always the rogue projectors that twisted and mangled the film into a form resembling a snarled fishing line, forcing you to call in the A/V equipment-maintenance crew, and occasionally the Suicide Prevention Hotline. If you turned a VCR on PLAY and heard a sound like bolts dropped in a meat grinder, it was safe to assume that you could kiss the tape goodbye. Slide projectors tended to be benign pieces of technology until you did something to provoke their anger, like use them to show slides. If you dared to insult them in this manner, they would take revenge by silently raising the heat levels of their projection bulbs, incinerating the slides. The smell of smoke and burning celluloid would be a tipoff that something was wrong, sending me scrambling for the nearest fire extinguisher as huge, scary flames shot up out of the slide carousel.

Then there were the TV/VCR carts, which resembled supermarket carts in that they always had one wheel that refused to co-operate with the other three. TV/VCR carts had a strange magnetic attraction to concrete, so that no matter which way you pushed, pulled, or dragged a TV/VCR cart down the hall, it would swerve to one side and crash violently into the walls. The TV/VCR carts in Hammond Building went beyond "annoying" to "life-threatening." The odd wheel on the cart was always loose and bent. One small push and the cart lurched off balance, tilting violently to one side like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and threatening to drop a 200-lb. TV set on your head. Maneuvering a TV/VCR cart down the halls in Hammond was like crossing the Rockies in a dune buggy loaded with nitro-glycerin.

Using the elevators in each building to move equipment up and down between floors was an additional source of frustration. I did a number of film showings in Osmond Building (a ten-story building located in the center of the campus) one week when the elevators there were malfunctioning. For some reason, they refused to move when you pressed the floor buttons, inside the elevator. They only moved if you pressed the call buttons on the wall outside. This meant that, in order to show a film on the fourth floor, I had to go down to the basement in Osmond Building, get the projector and speakers out of the A/V cabinet and put them on an A/V cart, hit the elevator call button in the basement, wait for the elevator to come down, place the A/V equipment inside the elevator, run up five flights of stairs, hit the call button on the fourth floor, and wait for the elevator to arrive. And when I finished showing the film, I had to do all this again in reverse to put the equipment away.

A/V SUPERVISOR: So how did that showing in Osmond go today?

ME: It had its ups and…oh, forget it!

My worst encounter with an elevator occurred in the Borland Dairy Laboratories, located on the north side of the campus. The A/V equipment in Borland Labs is stored in an A/V closet located in a remote hallway on the second floor, which is used mainly for storing unused dairy processing machinery. It is a very dark hallway, lit by a single buzzing light bulb. The whole area resembles a set from a horror movie, and A/V operators who venture down this hall usually do so carrying a baseball bat in case they encounter the spiders who live there, which are the size of St. Bernards but are much less friendly. (The rhythmic stomping sound that people sometimes hear as they enter this hallway is the sound of the spiders marching up the wall in formation.)

1  2  3  4