LOCK SHOP
Everyone should visit the bowels of physical plant. That’s where the digestion and distribution go on...
A walk in the north end of campus, by the engineering and science buildings.
Memories of my father at work. He was a civil engineer, taught at several schools. I would sometimes sneak into the labs and classrooms to see the equipment. I remember steam valves and vents, water turbines, tanks, filters, big and small motors, and things that I had no idea about what they did.
Sometimes I would fool around a bit.
Once I couldn’t get a mechanical calculating machine to stop jumping up and down tweaking the row of numbers across the carriage. I hit more buttons. No stopping it. I ran from the building.
Probably a kid can’t do things like that anymore.
Too much security... or insecurity.
And maybe too many really hazardous things, not like machines that you can see, but like radiation and chemical particles that you can’t see.
Anyway, the walk through that part of campus is a walk into another world from the one where I work. My end of campus is small buildings, offices, classrooms where people talk about Shakespeare or French or law, or something else bookish and wordy.
In the north end, the buildings are big and noisy, with loading docks like in a city. Cylinders of gas and ventilating machinery hint at what goes on inside these industrial blocks. The people are as friendly as anywhere else, and as anonymous.
What strikes me most about this foray into that other world from mine is that this is also my world.
Legal Studies exists in the same institution, isolated physically from the industrial buildings, but linked by budgets and bureaucracies, by shared resources of staff and management. The contrast seems strong, and it almost overshadows the linkages.
My journey begins as a trip to the physical plant department, a building into which I don’t think I had ever been before.
I am going to the lock shop, to get a key to a cabinet in a room in one of the engineering buildings where we will hold a conference this weekend. {See the karmic flour grain1 in event planning?}
The entrance to physical plant already reminds me of the city. Loading docks, trucks, exhaust, drivers and dock workers. A real hit of “where the rubber meets the road.” Or, at least, where the rubber stops rolling and the load meets or leaves the road.
Inside physical plant, I ask for the lock shop.
“Down the corridor, turn right, follow the blue key signs.”
Down the corridor, vast office spaces open behind doors ahead and left, with signs that indicate systems management and computers everywhere. A whole world of invoices and inventories, purchase orders, bills of lading, and all the rest that goes into supplying a huge campus with what it takes to operate.
Already I feel the shock of realization that of course this goes on.
Every day. I rely on it. The paper on my desk is not even the tip of the iceberg.
The first blue key sign points toward a door into a stairwell. The contrast is so sudden that I doubt and go back to look again at the sign. It points through the door, into a stairway that is clearly in another class from the front offices, an underclass.
The stair railing is worn smooth from the hands that grasp it at the turn.
On the floor below I exit the stairwell into a room vaster than those above, but this time not polished and furnished. A big warehouse, filled with shelves behind steel fencing, with corridors wide enough for forklifts going off in several directions.
I am in the bowels of the physical plant, following blue key signs into spaces intimately related to my daily institutional existence but increasingly far removed from my ordinary social world. These spaces are also increasingly clearly the ordinary social world of many people.
I pass a snack shop with cafe tables set out as if on a sidewalk, but all enclosed in the vast corridor environment, just like the subways in NYC.
At last, the lock shop. Keys to every room and cabinet in every building.
The source of access to anywhere, if you have the right papers to prove your right to such access.
Kafka works here. Or used to. He hasn’t been seen for quite awhile. Only his memory remains. And that is enough to keep everything on course, smoothly functioning, confirming and denying, as appropriate, requests for keys.
Everyone should visit the bowels of physical plant. That’s where the digestion and distribution go on, where people scramble to make ends meet so that for a few minutes at a time in thousands of places across campus, others can sit and read or write or talk.
Food for thought.
"Though my view is as spacious as the sky, My actions and respect for cause and effect are as fine as grains of flour.” Padmasambhava
I once recall hearing a professor say, “when you’re in the shower, keep in mind there’s an oil tanker, fracking well or coal train somewhere providing that hot water, wouldn’t hurt just to think about that.” …or something along those lines - never forgot it.
Peter, you have this remarkable gift for taking an ordinary errand—getting a key from the lock shop—and opening an entire hidden world underneath it.
By the time I reached the end, I wasn't thinking about keys anymore. I was thinking about all the invisible people whose work allows the rest of us to forget they're there.
I also laughed out loud at, "Kafka works here. Or used to." Perfect.
Another wonderful piece.
Judith