Unfiltered Story #343232
I was once pulled into a contract job on a project in crisis. Every hour counted in the early stages of my work and I was doing the work solo. The business had two offices, one was a bustling hive of marketing and advertising people, the other was a video recording studio that was generally unoccupied and when used, generally had no more activity than 1-3 people conversing on camera. There were two offices, one for a teacher who recorded an occasional show in the studio area with a handful of well-behaved kids who were never a problem.
I had a quiet, remote work environment. All was good. I had a few days to go over the problems with the system that was in crisis. I came in one day ready to tackle the problems and there was a maintenance guy in the studio with a half-dozen large wooden risers and a few hundred square feet of carpet. He apologized for being in the way (he didn’t seem to be) and told me he was there to cover the risers with carpet for the teacher. Fine. How bad could that be? I’d just have to put up with maybe an hour or two of hearing a staple gun with two sets walls between him and me. I was wrong.
I could tell the problem in about 20 minutes. He was using contact cement. At the first whiff, I knew I was in trouble. If you’ve never worked with contact cement, you should know that using as little as an ounce of the stuff in the space of a living room can be disturbing. For larger projects, I take them to the garage or outdoors. The packaging warns you to use outdoors or in a well ventilated area. In this case, two gallons were involved and — though the studio was the size of a 4-car garage — it wasn’t enough space.
When I came out of my office to see what he was doing, I saw him dashing for the door to get some air. I was already nauseous and felt a major headache coming on. I left for the day and made sure the owner knew why I didn’t accomplish anything that day. The idiot maintenance guy apparently spent time between smearing contact cement and making for the outdoors to clear his head and lungs. Since the studio was a good 100 feet inside an office building, I suspect other residents got gassed out, but I never heard about that. I so wanted to grab him later and say “RTFM, dude, RTFM!”
