It was the summer of 1992. The summer before I had been home taking classes (linear algebra and differential equations) at Arizona State, and I spent a lot of time being bored in my home town of Glendale, Arizona. I would have done just about anything to stay out of Arizona, if for nothing else than to do something different.

The chance came when I applied for and got the dubiously-prestigious "Engineering Stock Room Assistant" position with my friend, Dave Stepp. We were to work with Matt Masterson, the cool Scottish Guy who ran the stockroom. Or so we thought.

Matt had a very relaxed management style. In fact, he had no real style. He loved to drink beer (being from the British Isles) and he really loved Cutty Sark Whisky (being Scottish and all). He liked to goof off, go outside and have a smoke, and always had a joke or whimsical bit of verbiage to throw out in the hallway.

Having been in charge of the stock room for so long, and being sick and tired of working for The Golden Child of the engineering department, Mark Sbertole (the chairman thought he could do no wrong), he accepted a position as manager of the college A/V department, starting the very same summer that we were to work with him. That would have sucked, except for several circumstances that came about, not the least of which was the fact that he was just down the hall and he was always interested in messing with Mark.

So the summer came, and Mark laid down the law for us. The strict work hours, the time cards signed every week, the holiday and time off policies, and the fact that as a reward for a week's hard work, we might be able to get off early on Friday afternoon. What a guy. He smoked more than any sane human should, and he had a very very large bottle of Ralph Lauren Polo cologne, which he was trying his best to empty. He always had a key ring on his belt and a cup of stale coffee in his hand, and I recall seeing a cigarette tucked behind his ear more than once. In short, Mark and his 70's mustache made for a bevy of sights, sounds, and smells. We abhored them all, but he was our boss, and David and I were fairly committed to the summer of working on campus. We coped.

One bit of solace came on Friday's, which had been worked out with Matt's friend, Professor Joe King. This prof was (and is) probably the coolest guy on campus, so working for him was completely acceptable, and it was always something we actually tried to be useful on. He was doing a research project on Water Tree Development in High Current Carrying Cable Insulation, or something like that (I can't recall the title). It was eventually published in IEEE Materials, so I can actually say that I got published somewhere (though David and I mostly helped out in the lab, while Maura Grundmeyer, his full time assistant, and he wrote up everything). So Friday's were tolerable, especially when we got to play with silver nitrate and liquid nitrogen.

The work week was five days long, unfortunately, which meant that four of the days had to be spent with "Sberty." We soon caught on to his gig, however, and we found that his strict attendance to the 9am-5pm workday was a facade. He would arrive some time after 10am, typically, and while David was usually there moments before him to play a little bit of Solitaire on the old Windows machine, I never ever made it before 10:30. David and I were lifting, you see, and this made it difficult for me to sleep before 3am. More about that later.

Since Mark could hardly be seen sauntering in at such a later hour (though everyone knew when he got there anyway), he wouldn't really wander around too much. He would just come in, check on his gophers (Dan and Dave, who were also a pair of star athletes trying to get into the Olympics, which made for many comments), then sneak up to his office for who-knows-what. It was easy, then, for David to tell him that I was upstairs counting or moving something, since he would never actually check, and he could certainly never ask anyone else, lest they think he wasn't in control. Easy.

Our task was to inventory everything in the stockroom (like resistors, capacitors, logic analyzers, and all that) and then prepare it and the various engineering facilities for the start of classes in September. The first task that Sberty gave us was to move a large number of old IBM PC machines (yes, 8086 or slightly better) from the stock room shelves to a room across the hall. Then, we had to move them to another room down the hall. Then, we moved them back to a different room across the hall. Eventually, I think they all just got thrown out or given away. But they were fun to move.

One of our tasks was to clean up the E-54 lab, where sophomore engineers had just finished a semester of crazy lab work doing impossibly hard labs in too-little time. This made for some messiness, of course, and nowhere as there a larger mess than at the fluids lab station, where a set of pipes was used with a large reservoir of water to measure effective pipe lengths in bent-pipe sections. Someone had decided to put some dye in the water, turning the soft plastic tubing blue-green, and our task was to undo it. I figured it would make sense to make a strong bleach solution, put it in the reservoir, turn the system on, and let it run for a few hours while we went off to do something else. The emergency call was a little late, since the large return tube had come out of the reservoir and had (almost certainly with a large degree of hilarity) shot bleach water all over the entire lab.

We had to install some computers here and there, and when Mark wasn't looking, David and I helped Matt out with some A/V stuff, since there was always something going on in one of the lecture halls over the summer. That usually lead to us going to lunch at Joey's Barbecue, or sometimes The Buffalo Inn. Fine, fine establishments, both of them.

There were other students working on summer research projects, so much of the time we spent taking inventory of the various engineering work rooms was also spent chit chatting with these students. One group was doing something completely software-based, so that was boring. Another guy was doing stuff with Lasers, which was fun. One group was shaking our 5-story library building (the tallest on campus) with a large, heavy eccentric-mass rotator, which we had to help take off the library roof (almost no injuries, and hardly any damage to the walls) so that they could go shake damns with it. Cool.

Our friend Kevin Meager, a chemist-to-be, got a chemical engineering gig from one of the profs who was going to have a fermentation lab the following year, so he needed a student to run the lab all summer to generate some expected results and an ideal setup. Kevin knew a lot about beer, so this seemed like a match made in heaven. The only problem was, the equipment in use (from the 1980's, or earlier) was not automated, and the paper-tape recording media was usually not reliable, which ultimately lead to Kevin spending many crappy 50-hour periods where he would go to his lab room every 2 hours to record oxygen sensor readings, temperature, etc.

Right around the time he finished his first double-header-all-nighter, Harvey Mudd College was the proud recipient of several million dollars from Hewlett-Packard. I think what happened was they gave us a lot of money for a tax write off, then we turned around and bought a whole bunch of discounted hardware that they probably wanted to get rid of at a loss, for more write-offs. But, we got a whole lot of great measurement equipment out of the deal, so no one was complaining.

Sberty had laid out the entire new wing of the engineering building, and he was most proud of his "Measurement Lab." In it, we placed a large number of X-Stations (real computers, not just graphic terminals) and HP Measurement Mainframes, with tons of documentation and lots of cables and add-on cards with sensors and all kinds of cool stuff. They were all arranged in a single room, on a perimeter counter, with a big space in the middle. We unpacked the, made sure they all worked, and shut the lights out before we locked up.

Playing with oscilloscopes got boring (though we did find out that HP ships some models with Tetris built in), and counting resistors got painful, so we strolled into the measurement lab to play. They were equipped with HP-VeeTest, for "Virtual Engineering Environment," which was basically a big GUI-based object-oriented programming language (not unlike LabView from National Instruments, actually). We got to playing with that stuff in our off time, and we figured out (in spite of the crappy hp tech support crew) how to take some measurements of real-world events using this stuff. It was pretty cool.

One day, Kevin came down to the stock room to find a part for something, an he started complaining about how he was coming up on another crappy weekend of data collection, and he wished the paper-tape recorders could work for him so he wouldn't have to sleep so little. At some point, I think David and I just looked at each other, and without really speaking, we one of us grabbed the key for the Measurement Lab and took Kevin in to see his salvation.

Sbert wasn't around to ask, of course, and it was probably better that way. We loaded up the machines one a cart and rolled them upstairs. We fashioned together some probe wires to work with the raw terminals on the fermentation equipment, and we configured the mainframe to collect the right measurements on each pod (documentation? Who needed it). We fired up VeeTest and after a few samples from the slightly-more-experienced stock room crew, Kevin was able to generate a virtual paper-tape recording system, along with various other data displays and real-time calculations, so that data would be collected once per second for the duration of the 50 hours.

A few cursory checks to make sure it was working was all he did for that weekend, and once we had a working system, he showed the prof he was working for what we had done. He was pretty happy, to say the least, and if remember correctly, Mark said something about his Measurement Lab (conveniently located away from any place where measurements were being taken).

Anyway, it was that summer that some interesting things happened, away from work as well. David and I went to LA Fitness every day (taking the occasional day off, I suppose) for about 3 hours lifting, and we hung out with Maura and the others that were working there for the summer. I dropped a table on my head at the beginning of August, leading to about 20 stitches above my left eye.

Probably the most memorable thing, though, was meeting Azra, my friend from Istanbul, Turkey, who was staying with a bunch of other Turkish students on our campus in two of the other dorms. That will be another story, though.