Odd with a T - Story Section

Skidmarks

It's eleven o'clock on Friday night and I'm still at work. The last engineer. Collette waited until eight before she finally gave up and handed me her checklist for the passenger's side. The leader of the test lab, Chuck, stands up and walks from the control booth into the observation area. He's tall and wearing a faded blue flannel over his blue-gray work clothes. He has a pestered look on his face, it's been building for two or three days.

"What's going on there, Chuck?"

He stops, exasperated. He usually works first shift, but his second-shift counterpart Ben took a three-day weekend so Chuck's pulling a double. He and I got here about the same time this morning.

"We're still trying."

"Hey. It's not your fault. I blame the dummy."

Spike, the most evil of all the Test Dummies, decided to go bad on Tuesday night and gave us no useable data on the program manager's "must have" test. We scrambled up the test schedule and recalibrated him. Then he missed a couple channels again early yesterday, which led to hours on the phone – my most hated thing – trying to find the right level airbags and seatbelts stashed at somebody’s desk. The suppliers came through and had everything delivered. I swung by the office at 4:45 a.m. to load the 'bags, belts, steering columns, and knee bolsters in the van and drive them out here by six.

Chuck lifts his hat a little and rubs his face. He re-seats the hat and says, "That Spike is a real son-of-a-gun sometimes."

A technician on the other side of the window waves to him. Chuck excuses himself and goes into the test facility. I glance over Collette's passenger-side checklist. When Chuck gets to the buck he nods a couple times, then rests one hand on his knee and the other on one of the buck’s steel uprights and bends to look at the bottom of the instrument panel that's been installed for this last test.

We're running an N-Cap, the Granddaddy of all the safety tests we run. The test simulates driving your vehicle into an immovable object (say, a brick wall) at thirty-five miles an hour, or another vehicle of the same mass at something like seventy-five or eighty (I can't remember the equations right now) with no seatbelts, just the airbags to protect you. I've seen some post-test parts and they're disgusting to think about in terms of real life. What would my leg look like if I did THAT to the knee bolster? How about my …

Chuck waves at me.

Shit.

I jump off the giant cement block I'm sitting on and enter through the heavy steel door. It’s been three hours since Collette left and it feels like we're about one step closer to actually shooting this test.
I miss her. She's been the incidental therapist I so sorely need. I've been able to tell her a little about my life before I moved to Detroit. Not all of it, like the part where I was tripping on mushrooms when I moved out of my house in the suburbs of Minneapolis and into my parents' basement at two o'clock in the morning. But she knows I left my wife and she knows that I've got some chemical tendencies. I've met her boyfriend, Luke. He's from the West Indies. I don't believe he is aware that cannabis is illegal in the United States, or at least he doesn't seem to care.

The technician with Chuck is The King of Union Breaks. His name is Dexter. He is an absolute fuck. There is no other way to describe him. An ugly, barrel-shaped, cap-wearing fuck who only smiles when someone is pissed off. Sadly, I need him, so I remain cool around him at all times.

I smile. "How ya doin' Dexter?"

He grunts.

"What's up, Chuck?"

"We got a problem."

I bend down to look under the steering column with Chuck. I want to say: "You’ve gotta be shitting me, Chuck. What the fuck is that?!?" But Chuck is the only person I've met in Detroit who doesn't swear, so I politely ask, "What the …uh … is going on Here?" And I point with emphasis.

"Well, near as we can tell," Chuck stands up straight, "it looks like somebody put in the knee bolster upside down." He looks to Dexter. "I guess."

"Yeah."

I try to ignore Dexter looking at me like it was my fault. I spin a little and collapse with a grunt onto the dirty floor of the buck, between the dash and the seat riser. I grab hold of the bottom of the steering wheel and crunch my stomach muscles to investigate closer. "I didn't even know that was possible."

"It's not," says Dexter. "Jack put that fucking thing on upside down. Only used two screws to hold the fucking thing. Damn trim doesn't even fit on."

Dexter doesn't like Jack. He doesn't care that Jack worked two extra hours this afternoon, welding seats for me in an attempt to catch up on this stupid test series. In fact, he probably thinks it sucks. These fucking guys use up so much energy worrying about what this guy makes and how many hours that guy got over and what job so-and-so put in for, that they can barely get anything done between their breaks. Jack's old ass was worn out, I bet he went home and took a nap. And if so, he deserved it. Extra seats are the one thing I can not come up with, and nobody else was going to put those broken-ass seats back together.

"I'll take care of it," I say. "I had Jack welding seats, he probably just got rushed."

"He probably said, 'Fuck it, let them fuckers fix it!'"

Chuck puts a hand on Baxter's shoulder. Chuck does like Jack. They work together every day and have for years - twenty-seven of them. Their kids went to the same school. Even their grandkids know each other. He speaks to me in a fatherly tone. "We'll take care of it, Zack."

"Are you sure? I don't mind. I'm done with the data crunching. And I'm bored off my ass."

"No. It's our mistake, we'll fix 'er up."

I know what he's really saying: You're not Union, you can't touch our tools, or our jobs. So I leave. I hate the 'you guys' and 'us' mentality. It's the only bad part about coming to the Proving Grounds. I am an engineer, therefore I can't touch anything ... and I don't know what I'm doing, and I make things more difficult than necessary, and I change my mind, and I suck. They are The UAW Union guys … resentful, surly, slow-moving bastards who jam parts together incorrectly at the slightest hint that they might have to do something extra, like work four hours out of an entire shift. And God forbid, as an engineer, you try to do something to speed up the process. I nearly got a grievance filed on me the first week I came out here. Dexter was afraid to change some inflators, so after a long discussion I borrowed a wrench from Dexter. The fuck was setting me up. Ben came out of the control room ready to kick me out of the building. He thought I had just walked over to the bench and picked up a tool. At one point, before I convinced him I was doing the airbag modifications because I had sensed Dexter was apprehensive around the explosives (and Dexter sensed he couldn't throw me under the bus), Ben was ready to shut the whole test series down.

I'm hungry.

I skipped dinner. I mistakenly thought that me being in the shop would cause the guys to work. They spent the whole time trying to convince me that I needed to buy them pizza, and beer. I didn't. I'm not only a contract guy with no expense account, but I'm working contract for the supplier, I can't even offer them a discounted safety belt. I'm basically another tool that the O.E.M. has leased to get the job done. And I'm broke. I moved here with everything I owned in the back of a Bronco II. I sleep on a pullout couch at some friends’ house and have been wearing the same three shirts and two pairs of pants for the last five weeks. I just recently received my first paycheck and I'm finally no longer drinking water for breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner.

I choose popcorn from the vending machines in the break room, stick it in the microwave and hit the button. This is how simple my dinner is to prepare. I don't even have to guess the time. I just push the POPCORN button. Even so, I become impatient. I check C-TV on the screen in the corner. It's the company's television network. The big news lately has been The Asper. They're looping the same rubber-burning segment I've seen four times this week. I still watch. When did waiting one minute and forty seconds for a microwave to finish your dinner become such an eternity?

I try to calculate how long it will take to run this last test. The screwed-up IP (Instrument Panel) makes it impossible to determine. It may embarrass Dexter and he might put everything together and razz people into getting all the shit done in the next forty minutes and I could be out of here by a quarter after twelve, or he might completely throw his hands in the air and try to get two hours over, too. (They don’t use the word overtime; they say ‘over’ as in ‘I just pulled one over on you.’) No. That will never happen. Nobody is staying until two. Nobody. Not on a Friday. He'd get his head fucking kicked in if he tried to pull that shit. Yet, he could drag it out long enough for them to start wondering about seeing this same stupid program again on Monday.

They hate this program that I'm on. The full-sized van. Not only is it the least popular vehicle for the direct employees to drive, it's also big and heavy with very little impact zone at the front. It's a safety systems nightmare -- with regards to the tests. In real life, it is an incredibly safe vehicle to drive. You're bigger than practically everybody, so the other car, and the other person, will take the brunt of the impact.

Ding.

I extract the bag, shake it and open it up. It's hot, but I jam a huge handful into my mouth, then another, and another as I head back to the test lab. Halfway between the break room and the lab one of those husk-things flings itself into the back of my throat and I make a sound like a cat coughing cheese. I have to stop and learn how to breath again. The choking causes my eyes to water and because of the blurry vision I can't believe what I'm seeing when I finally make it back to the observation area.
They have the knee bolster fixed, the seats re-installed, and they're getting read to load the dummies. Not just one. Both dummies are resting in their tall, PVC-pipe chairs beside the track. They did half a day’s work in the time it took me to cook and nearly die on microwave popcorn. Chuck's checking the driver’s side dummy and the dummy tech is on the passenger side.

You see this guy about three times a week. He likes to sneak in and out of the lab. I assume he’s either anti-social or just can't stand another Crash Test Dummy joke. The day shift guy will go over the numbers on the laser with you and make sure it's all good. This guy gives the dummy coordinates to Ben, usually, and you receive them sometime after you need them for data analysis.

This scene right here is what's amazing and depressing to me about the Union, specifically the guys in this building. These guys are unbelievable mechanics, nearly every single one of them can do everything - electrical, mechanical, sensors, welding, the whole deal. They could build a vehicle for our next crash out of parts they have stashed around the facility, and it would probably outperform the current vehicle. BUT, they work to the lowest common denominator. And the more seniority they gain, the harder they compete to lower the bar.

I’ve talked about this with a lot of my friends. Sure, there was a time when Unions were very important. They helped create a safe work place and a realistic wage for people who were otherwise being abused, and not the whiny, cry-baby shithead ‘abuse’ that we bitch about today. They were truly being used up and replaced. None of us can even imagine what it was like when only the greedy and indecently rich had a say in what was fair. Unions were a necessity. They showed corporations how to treat people, then, unfortunately, the Unions themselves became an enormous corporation. And with a corporation comes an over-whelming and often ridiculously unwarranted sense of entitlement in the individuals. The sense of security kills something off in people.

I grab my clipboard and scan through both checklists.

When I look up they’ve hoisted the passenger. In technical terms, she is a 5th-percentile female Anthropomorphic Test Device (ATD). In tv-commercial terms, she's a Crash Test Dummy wearing a pink pajama top with matching shorts. Her partner rises out of his chair, too. He’s in blue pajamas with the legs cut off and is an average-size (50th percentile) male with yellow and orange lines of paint on his face that match hers. They're a cute couple and as the cables from the ceiling cranes dangle them from hooks screwed into the top of their metal skulls, I smile. I figure at least one of them is involved in an adulterous affair.

The thought causes me to giggle. I check the clock to touch reality. The second hand makes one tick and it is exactly midnight - to the second - on a Friday. I had forty hours in by lunch on Wednesday. I laugh a little harder. I’m going to make over a grand in overtime alone this week. The laugh builds to a snort. This is it. I may be losing it.

The dummies are now twenty feet in the air, hovering over the buck. They crash together, smacking each other with their arms. It looks like a slap fight. The female kicks the male in the upper thigh. I completely lose it and have to clamp my hand over my mouth. Chuck and the tech get the dummies separated and begin to lower them. The female goes in smoothly, but the male's left leg snags on the top bar of the buck, then slips off and the ribs bang on the large-diameter steel tubing. It looks like a clumsy ninja and I release a high-pitched shriek of a laugh that causes Dexter to turn.

I dive to the floor.

"What the hell was that?"

I have to compose myself. I think of the fact that I’ll be sending everything I make in overtime home to pay for the mortgage on a house I don't live in. I’m pretty sure my wife was already dating one of the dealers living in our basement by the time I left, and she definitely had developed a coke problem. She told me so on the playground of an elementary school near our house. We had to go there to talk, since stoners were roaming our basement.

I sober up. And for once I don’t get depressed. A couple months ago I was driving down the freeway by myself, screaming. Tonight I'm laughing hysterically. I’m still alone, and maybe a little schizophrenic, but I guess this is an improvement.

I take a deep breath to pull it together, stand up with my clipboard, and walk to the door. I cross the rails and go to the passenger side first. Nobody says anything. They're not looking at me. This is another cool part about being out here. Everyone’s focused on the pre-test details. Fuck up now and you've wasted thousands of dollars in parts and man hours. I particularly appreciate their focus tonight, since they don’t notice the tears drying on my cheeks. My hair has grown out a little and it’s puffy; I must look like a sad clown.

I catch myself from chuckling. I tell myself: This is serious. Be serious. And I go over Collette’s checklist. The correct airbag is in place. I assume the correct inflator is installed. I'm not supposed to know exactly how our competitor's passenger side system works. The seat's correct. The belt is not there. The I/P is right. The [blah, blah, blah …], and the dummy is a 5th-percentile female Anthropomorphic Test Device. Everything on the list is there.

Check.

The driver's side has all the right stuff. I made sure they had the correct set of parts for this test and corralled all the extra steering columns, wheels, and 'bags in the warehouse earlier. The extras are boxed and ready to ship back to the office on Monday morning. The dummy tech is shaking the hips of the driver to get him situated. One of the last steps during setup is to measure the location of the dummies' head, shoulders and H-point, as an out-of-position occupant can drastically change the effectiveness of safety equipment in a crash. (If you ride in vehicles, you might want to read that sentence a couple more times, start at H-point.) Lasers are used to site the yellow and black discs on the sides of the dummies. As the tech dials in the positions I go over the checklist in my head one last time. It's tough. I don’t know if it’s the concentration or maybe the popcorn reached my stomach and the digesting is making me drowsy, but I'm suddenly concerned I might fall asleep on the way home. It’s been close a couple times this week.

I verify the dummy's knee and chest positioning on my own with a tape measure and step away from the setup.

The camera tech asks, "Everything good?"

“Snap away.”

There are a lot of connections to check and double check when you're running a sled test. The guys go through them all. The buck itself has accelerometers and sensors all over it. The electrical sensor technicians are going over them. I check everything over again, actually marking the boxes on my form this time. I fill in the part numbers and serial numbers from memory. Inside the giant welded cage are two seats, an instrument panel (with no radio or gages), a glove box, knee bolsters, a steering column with wheel, and the aforementioned dummy couple. I check everything over then walk out of the lab into the warehouse.

I was hired ten days after arriving Detroit, and this job has been a pleasant distraction. I want to do it well. There is finally some destruction in my life that I enjoy. My job consists of acquiring all the parts from the different departments and suppliers and then somehow making sure they all get delivered to this building on the Proving Grounds. It often means multiple drives in the company van, one hour from work each way, then late nights of data crunching and watching crash footage one frame at a time. During my interview I saw a controlled explosion in one of the labs. They offered me a piddly wage and I leaped on it. I got drunk with my boss last week and found out I probably could've made another two or three bucks an hour, had I asked. Doesn't matter, I still doubled how much I was making in Minnesota.

I round the corner from the warehouse to the observation / controls area and jump up onto my place on the three-foot-tall cement block. It’s used to hold down the giant air cylinder that shoots the buck down the track. My popcorn is still slightly warm. Everything is good. The sled is rolled up into position and the lab clears out. As exhausted as I am, I begin to get excited. This happens every time. Most of the guys don’t even watch. They’ve become jaded after being here day after day for years. I don’t think I’ll ever get sick of it.

Chuck is programming the "pulse" into the equipment. He still has at least eight switches to flip, by my count. I don't know what any of them do, but I've watched he and Ben go through enough pre-launch setups that I have an idea of which ones get flipped. This whole process, though expensive and sometimes legally awkward to discuss, saves the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, and really does improve the safety of the vehicle. It seems. They no longer have to spend time and money building prototype vehicles to be destroyed. They run a sled test, hand me the data and footage, I put together some graphs, form a few opinions and eventually someone way above me makes a decision on what to change.

This last part always takes too long. I become melancholy. I think of leaving the Twin Cities. I remember watching St. Paul in my rearview mirror around three o’clock in the morning and crossing Wisconsin in a terrible, thick fog. It was as if the gray mess in my head had blanketed the road and spilled into every ditch along the freeway. It didn't matter that I couldn't see where I was going. I had to leave. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Without her, that city, the whole state of Minnesota, held nothing for me.

The count-down begins. Valves release and explosive gases hiss into the huge air cylinder below me, loading all the stages. It's like a highly condensed fireworks show. At the count of five, the angled bank of lights on either side of the test set-up clunks on. It always reminds me of playing a night football game back in high school. At two, the high-speed cameras, set to take one-thousand pictures per second while handling a 60 G impact, whir on. They sit on triangular perches around the sled, pointing to where the dummies are about to hit.

One. BOOM! The cement base shakes. The buck launches. The squibs fire off the airbags and ...
The fifth-percentile female dummy in the passenger seat shoots out the side of the buck when the 'bag hits her and flies up into the air, probably ten or fifteen feet high with her arms and legs flailing. The buck keeps going. It spins her. Then she smacks down face first so everybody can hear it, but before her legs have even landed the umbilical cord at the bottom of her spine catches and rips her down the track, chasing after the buck on her head. The cord is made up of all these multi-colored wires so it looks like she’s being drug upside-down by the nerve endings on her spinal cord. It’s the wildest fucking thing I ever saw, and I’m pretty sure I made the whole thing up because all this shit, the whole test, happens in milliseconds. So I just stare down the tracks until everything comes to a stop. The dummy rests in a pile. From two-hundred feet away it’s easy to see that she is destroyed. This one won’t be fixed via recalibration. Everyone around me is absolutely open-mouthed.

Finally, Chuck – who dates back to the first sled tests ever ran in this facility – says, “Well, I’ve never seen that happen before.” And we all crack up. Most of the guys leave for the weekend, figuring we are done. Chuck sticks around to finish up his charts, but he's not saying anything and I'd rather just leave, too.

Unfortunately, I still have to make my post-test observations before I can go party with a friend in Canton. I know a guy with a stash of Jimmy weed … and I'm the guy.

You’re supposed to wait at least ten minutes for the chemicals from the inflators to clear the air before you go into the test facility. I wait two and decide to just deal with the burning stench. The first thing I notice as I walk out is that the dummy’s head has left skidmarks on the other side of the track. She's off to the side of the buck with large sections of her thick rubber skin torn off and all her sensors broken. It's a little too life-like to be honest, but I keep going to the tech’s cabinet and grab a Polaroid. He let’s me use his camera. It's heavy and my feet are dragging, and I'm just hoping everything on my side is normal so I can take a few standard snapshots and go home. I figure I’ll examine my crumpled parts more thoroughly on Monday.

I’m distracted by the female dummy at the back of the test area, so I don’t really see mine until I’m right up next to what would be the driver door – if there was one. His back is turned to me and both his feet are positioned between the two seats. He's leaning forward towards the passenger side door with both arms outstretched. His hands are reaching. It's as if he’s still screaming, “NOOO!”

I close my eyes. Open them. It looks like he almost had her, as if he might have grabbed some of the fabric on her shirt before she was ejected. My face breaks into a smile. I let out a little chuckle, just enough to raise my shoulders up and down. Then my internal narrator, a voice I know all too well these days, says, “It’s like he’s completely unaware he’s been in an accident of his own.”

My knees give out. Without warning my feet ache from eighty hours of concrete. My lungs hurt. I bend over with my hands on my knees, hoping I won’t throw up, and think of the wife I’ve left in Minneapolis. All along I’d blamed her drug use, her inability to cope, her, for our breakup. Yet, I was having arguments inside my own head. It had been months since I’d gone a day without a drink. And I’d actually convinced myself that I had stopped smoking weed because I smoked alone, every day. I ... I was just wrong on so many levels. I was out of control.

I had lost my house, my wife, my entire life was starting over from scratch and none of my friends or family had said anything. It was this fucking dummy that told me. This inanimate object showed more concern for his trashed female friend than I had for mine.

Fuck.

I clench my fists, my arms begin to shake as if I’m going to punching something. Or need to punch something. I’m recharged enough to walk out of the test lab. Chuck says something to me from his desk as I pass through the door.

“We’ll talk about it on Monday. I’ll call you.”

He wants to leave as bad as I do, but he’s not moving. He watches me walk through the observation area. I can tell he wants to ask if I’m okay. Everybody lately seems to be asking, “Are you okay?”

I’m not.

“Hey.” He takes off his hat and holds the bill with both hands in front of his chin. “Have a good weekend, Zack.”

“Yeah. You too, Chuck.”

I leave. Part of me wanted him to ask. But where do you begin when it’s gotten this far? Who has advice for someone whose life has gone so wrong that they moved to Detroit? How do you explain any of it? Especially after seeing that test. We’re all crashing all the time. Sometimes I just fucking hate symbolism.

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Skidmarks