Looking the Part

Over the past few months I’ve been the manager for a seven figure project funded by the U.S. government. The facility that I was using cost us approximately $10,000/day and nothing happen with the tunnel unless I gave the call. Therefore if we divide that by the number of hours I’m allowed to use the tunnel per day (~15 hours), we get that my time there was worth about $670/hour. So why am I throwing these numbers at you…obviously to impress everyone right…no actually this is one of those occasions that I get to share some irony (my favorite form of humor).

The obvious source of irony would be to compare my worth per hour with my pay…I’ll spare my dignity and not share what the second number is (lets just say that it only takes a few hours to equal my monthly salary). However there is a better one that made me crack up quite often. Lets say you are aware of those numbers and then go to meet the guy that is running all of this…you would probably expect to meet someone that was pretty decently dressed. Perhaps not a tie but at least nice clean shirt and khakis would be worn. When I compare that image with the one of me it just simply makes me laugh out loud. I looked so bad that one of the professors asked for my waist size so that he could buy me a new pair of shorts. Let me share with you my typical attire.

You might think that these clothes simply need a wash and besides that they aren’t too bad. Well lets take a closer look.

I’ll start with the shorts. First thing you should notice is the red stains…this would be rhodamine 6G. You might say, “Brian what is rhodamine 6G,” well it is a toxic dye that I was constantly covered head to toe in during the test. This dye stained basically every piece of clothing I wore in Memphis and washing has a minimal effect on it (side note that I also managed to stain a large portion of the facility…I don’t think they appreciated it). Secondly you should note that the right pant leg is ripped nearly in half. The rip was slowly growing from about the half way point in the test until the last day when they finally ripped all the way down. To get through the last day of work I took electrical tape (I couldn’t find duct tape) and taped my pant leg together…I got some sweet looks when I went to Home Depot to pick up a few things. I even had this one guy see me walk in then went and got his buddy and came looking for me to show him…they tried to be sneaky about it, but it was really obvious when they were spending more time looking at my shorts then at the hammers they were supposedly buying.

Now to the shoes…these things looked almost this bad after the first two weeks I was in Memphis. So really it is impressive how well they held up. Sadly this picture doesn’t fully show the damaged that has been inflicted on these shoes. Even still you get a good look at the nice big rip that runs along the side of the shoe, the rubber in the front that once went nearly to the top of the shoe but now stops on the bottom, and like everything I have it is covered in red dye. I’ve had many suggests for what to do with these shoes once the test was over. My favorite two are either cover them with gasoline and burn them or get them bronzed and leave them in our office as a memorial to Hiplate.

The real kicker is that not only did I look like this when I worked at the facility, but I didn’t change when we went out to eat. As you can imagine I would often draw a few looks when I walked into a nice restaurant (I even had a real nice double take once from a guy…you know he glances over then quickly wipes his head back to take a second look). There was only one restaurant that I actually didn’t feel comfortable eating at…I’m fine with going into a place that has candle light at each table and slightly dimmed lights, but the one that had red roses at each table was too much. We all agreed that perhaps this place was a little too nice for us and we went to a different restaurant.