The University Is Shocking

© 2013 by Frank Acker. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 02/23/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1687-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1688-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013902902

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Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 1

Edward Ello was the most hated man in Burkhardt University’s Electrical Engineering Department. He was barely five feet tall, thin, wiry, and old. He had a mop of bristly iron-gray hair and a large gray handlebar mustache. His perpetual scowl made everyone hesitate to even say Good morning or otherwise attract his attention. He was king, that is, shop foreman of his domain which included the electrical instrument room where students checked out equipment for their laboratory classes and of a series of interconnected workshops for specialized repair and fabrication of all sorts of equipment and instruments. This mini-empire was located in the second basement (four long flights of stairs below the first floor) of Engineering Hall which was built into the side of a steep hillside. All the floors had windows on three sides until you got three or more levels below the first floor. For security purposes, Ello’s domain had only one small window high up on the back wall of the instrument room, one door connecting to the rest of the building, and one door to the outside. Ello, Professor Evers the department chairman, and the head of Campus Security had the only keys to the doors.

Ello inherited his kingdom from his father after many years of apprenticeship and servitude. He ruled for forty years as his father had for the previous thirty. He knew every piece of equipment, dusty storage shelf, and the construction behind every wall in the building. He also knew the skeletons in every personal closet of Engineering Hall. Ello had two slaves, very elderly assistants he continually terrorized with erratic tantrums. He screamed out threats to fire or physically abuse them in front of students and faculty so everyone would know who was really in charge. This also intimidated those who would dare to approach the Lord of the Instruments. This included the Department Chairman and the faculty. The students called Ello The Mushroom and often referred to the traditional old wheeze of The fungus among us.

Ello was tolerated by the Electrical Engineering Department chairman and faculty for several reasons. First, he was the consummate instrument maker. He could fix every piece of equipment from the most delicate micromanipulator where watchmaker’s tools were too gross for the work to the 5-ton dynamos where a sledgehammer was the fine adjusting tool. Not only could he maintain this wide range of equipment but he could make the components for and construct any apparatus that the faculty and graduate students might need for their research, provided they could persuade him to fit their project into his list of things he wanted to do.

Second, he had an incredibly accurate and organized memory. He remembered everything that had been done to and in the building as well as every apparatus constructed in the last fifty years. He knew the detailed characteristics and peculiarities of each piece of equipment and faculty member in the department.

Finally, he worked cheap. He was paid about half of what the lowliest of the graduates would receive on their first job. He had tried to get other jobs over the years, but his temper and love of tormenting those around him inevitably got him fired. Back to his kingdom he would trudge to be rehired, a little more irascible and trailing another reason for the department chairman not to give him a raise in salary. He was sure that he was unfairly treated, and he took revenge on every person he met, whether he had ever met them before or not.

The first day of the fall school term that the students had a laboratory class, Ello would stand at the checkout window of the instrument room. Normally, one of his assistants would handle instrument checkout, but this was a special opportunity to tease students that just couldn’t be missed. Up on the second floor, a graduate student teaching assistant would introduce sophomores to their first electrical laboratory problem. This would require them to select a variety of voltmeters and ammeters to perform some simple measurements. They would be told to get their instruments from the instrument checkout window, three floors down.

A few minutes after class bell had rung, sophomores started clumping down the six flights of stairs. Undergraduates didn’t have elevator privileges. Most of the students expected to pick up some sort of standard laboratory kit. They might happen to take a detour along the first floor hall. There they would have found a bulletin board about four feet high and twelve feet long that listed, in very fine print, each and every instrument that was available from the instrument room along with its most important characteristics. Few if any students noticed this bulletin board until after their first lab experience.

As they lined up twenty students deep in front of the instrument window, the first shy student asked for a voltmeter. Ello fixed the young man with his twinkling evil eye and screamed at him You wanna voltmeter! What the hell kind of voltmeter? See all those shelves? He waved his arm at dozens of shelves behind him. We got hunnerds of meters. What kind? Which one you want? You’re holdin’ up the line! We all got better things to do than wait for you to make up your fucking mind!

Sometimes the student didn’t slink away from the confrontation. Sometimes he would stand his ground and say, I need to measure up to ten volts. Give me a meter that measures ten volts.

Ello would snarl We got meters that measure DC, AC, RF, IF, microwaves, and lots of other things. They all measure ten volts. Which one you want? Quit wasting my time!

All of the juniors and seniors knew, and so did Ello, that the first sophomore experiments all used Direct Current meters. Eventually, one of the students would say the magic acronym, DC. Then Ello would move away from the window with agonizing slowness, grab the ladder that he had previously placed beside the checkout window and lean it against one of the stacks of shelves. He would arthritically climb up to the top shelf and carefully and laboriously work a large suitcase sized wooden box off the shelf and balance his way down the ladder. He would gently place the box on the counter in front of the student and blow and rub the thick layer of dust off the top. This revealed a brass plate glued to the instrument cover, VALUE $380. He would open the box to show an antique instrument that might have been used by Thomas Edison. The date of manufacture, 1927, was handwritten in ink on the instrument face.

This particular meter, selected with the connivance of Ello and the student’s lab instructor, had the property that when used in the sophomore’s first experiment, the meter would not read anything and the experimental circuit would be destroyed in a small puff of smoke. The experienced upperclassmen in the line would giggle and smirk for apparently unknowable reasons as the sophomore carefully started up the stairs with his thirty pound, large, delicate, expensive, and ancient instrument.

It would take close to an hour for the line of students to get their instruments. By that time, the first students would be returning, convinced that they had wrecked Ello’s valuable instrument. Now came the choice part where Ello would explode in a violent tantrum. He would scream at the student, calling him or her every vile name in his recollection at the top of his voice, a truly educational experience. The student would certainly ruin the reputation of the school should he ever graduate and that would only happen if their professors were incompetent nincompoops. Their grades would be withheld until they had paid for repairs (actually, there were none.) He announced to all within earshot that the student would receive a bill later in the term. Since there was no bill, the student would get more and more apprehensive as the term neared its end.

Sometimes in this repetitive and long process, a red-faced and sometimes teary student would wander down the first floor hall and notice the bulletin board with its list of instruments. After an ethical struggle as to whether to keep this gold mine a secret, he would share his newfound information with some of his classmates. The news would quickly spread, and by the end of the three-hour long laboratory period, the students would be asking for specific instruments and working with a minimum of delay and aggravation from Ello. He would only service the instrument checkout window for the morning of that day. After that, it wasn’t fun anymore, so he would assign one of his assistants take over for the rest of the year.

This afternoon, five weeks into the fall term, Ello was wearing brown coveralls with a faded red flannel rag drooping out of his back pocket. He shuffled down the dim windowless hallway of the first basement, one floor above his domain, to the glass and oak double doors that blocked the end of the passage. He mumbled to himself as he walked, Go wipe down the bushings, he says. The students will want to use the high voltage laboratory. Why can’t they do it themselves? I ask. They might fall off the ladder and hurt themselves. Shit! I might fall and hurt myself, but that’s alright! Stupid student sons-a-bitches must be kept safe. They musn’t get their hands dirty. Next I’ll be asked to wipe their asses for them. They might get carpal tunnel or some such. Smart collitch kids too dumb to handle a dust rag! All they are good for is cryin’ and whinin’. If they weren’t at least good at getting their daddies to give them money, we’d all be up shit crick.

He was still cursing under his breath as he unlocked and pulled open the rightmost of the double doors to the Small Electrical Machines Laboratory. A flood of warm stuffy air poured out of the room. He grabbed his schnoz and squeezed to stop an incipient sneeze. The laboratory smelled of lubricating oil and old well-cooked electrical insulation. He swung the door all the way back against the hallway wall. There was a small wooden wedge on the floor by the wall. He cursed louder and wiggled and slid the wedge around with his foot so that the thin edge was under the door. He gave it a sharp kick to block the door open. The laboratory was huge, 75 feet wide and 100 feet deep, with a thirty foot high ceiling. Shafts of sunlight streamed through tall dust-speckled windows along the back wall and allowed him to see his way without turning on the overhead lights.

He walked along the slate-gray electrical patchboard that stretched across the entire front of the room. A quick glance showed him there were no electrical cables connected to the patchboard, and all of the circuit breakers spaced along the top of the patchboard were in the open position. The entire room should be electrically dead. He turned to the right and worked his way toward the back of the room through a maze of German shepherd sized transformers, motors, generators, and miscellaneous pieces of electrical equipment scattered haphazardly over the unfinished and splintery oak floor. A fifteen foot high fence of steel bars separated the back quarter of the room from the rest. A white pasteboard sign fastened high up on the bars displayed

"DANGER

High Voltage

100,000 volts"

in large red letters. The area behind the bars was the high voltage cage where potentially dangerous electrical experiments could be carried out while the researchers and students were safely locked outside the bars in the front section of the room.

Ello went to a sliding section of the fence that served as a door. He unlocked and removed a heavy brass padlock from a large lever alongside the cage door. He grabbed the lever with both hands and yanked it down. He heard the reassuring clank as the attached mechanism released the door and opened the safety interlocks for the electrical circuits feeding the high voltage transformer inside the cage. He slid the door open and re-padlocked the lever in the safe position. He looked up at the parallel pair of long, horizontal, two inch diameter, dust covered, dull brown copper pipes suspended overhead. They were spaced ten feet apart and were hanging twenty feet above the floor, suspended from long strings of ceramic insulators fastened to the ceiling. These pipes were the hot terminals that distributed the high voltage electricity in the cage. Users would connect their experimental equipment to these pipes using oversized battery clamps and extra-long spark plug wires.

Ello grabbed the grounding stick that was always clipped to the bars next to the door. This was a long and heavy fiberglass pole that carried a quarter inch thick copper cable, woven from many hair-fine strands of copper wire so as to be very flexible. He checked that the long trailing end of the wire was connected to both the building structural steel framework and the cage fence by fist sized bronze clamps. He heaved the grounding stick up like an extra heavy ocean fishing pole and touched the end of the cable to each of the copper pipes. Then he tucked the grounding stick under his arm like a knight’s jousting lance and touched the end to the terminals of each electrical device inside the cage. Better be doubly safe than sorry. Now he was certain everything in the cage was guaranteed electrically dead.

A tall stepladder leaned against the cream colored brick wall between two of the windows. It was normally used to reach the overhead copper pipes. Coughing and wheezing from the dust, Ello wrestled the ladder over to the high voltage transformer. He stumbled around piles of unused electric cables and wobbly stacks of equipment piled on the floor. The high voltage facility had not been used for the past five years, and the cage was now storage space for seldom used or spare materials and equipment. The department chairman, Dr. Evers, had asked Ello to clean up the cage this afternoon. Ello had told him that the accumulated dust and grime on the transformer bushings made it dangerous to apply voltage to the system, so now Ello had been given the job to clean them. It had to be done thoroughly and carefully, so he couldn’t trust his tech assistants or work-study students to do it. Later, they would be assigned to move the junk on the floor.

The outer shell of the high voltage transformer was a gray, vertical steel cylinder, eight feet in diameter, and twelve feet high. It had a dome-shaped bottom and top and contained insulating oil, an iron core, and lots of copper wire. Some vandal had painted eyes, nose, mouth, and a van Dyke beard on the cylinder. The ceramic bushings that connected the transformer to the overhead pipes looked like two large horns on what was clearly supposed to be the devil’s head. Ello grinned. He would make one of his helpers sand the graffiti off and repaint the cylinder.

He climbed about halfway up the ladder and stepped off onto the top dome. He pulled the red flannel rag from his back pocket and began to wipe the dust off the bushings. By standing on tip-toe, he could just reach to top of the first bushing As he stretched up, he felt a tingling in his feet. An instant later, before he could move his hand, he saw a white flash, then nothing…

Chapter 2

Jerry Martin had kissed his pregnant young wife, Chris, and his two year old daughter goodbye at four-thirty that afternoon. One month ago, he had stood in front of a desk explaining to his police captain why he was quitting the force after successfully completing 7 of his 24 month probationary period. He had always wanted to be a cop, and that was fine with Chris until she was pregnant for the second time. It hadn’t helped that his senior partner was still in the hospital recovering from three bullet wounds.

They had responded to a domestic disturbance. A husband and wife were screaming at each other. It looked like fists and dinner plates were about to fly. A kid, not yet even a teenager,