jad@lanl.ARPA (08/20/85)
The Great Dwire Hall Flood -or- "You mean we can't play frisbee in the halls anymore???" I began my college career at the Colorado Springs campus of the University of Colorado. This campus was established in 1965 at an old tuberculosis sanatorium (or sanitarium, depending on how you like to spell it). The running joke was that it was the only T.B. hospital to be turned into an insane asylum. A few years later a building was added to one side of the old hospital, all brick and ugly concrete. This edifice was named Dwire Hall, and it housed a small theater, several labs, the engineering department and the computer center. Being an engineering student, and being employed by the computer center I hung out at Dwire quite a lot - spending the night working on an interesting project with friends, playing frisbee and generally goofing off. It was approaching Saint Valentine's day. As I had the year before, I was running a "dating service" for the students of the high school from which I had graduated. In fact, I was doing this as a favor for one of my professors whose son was in his senior year. This service consisted of a computer matching program that would apply likes and dislikes of a given boy against that of all of the girls, and determine which was supposedly best suited. I had help earlier in the day from a group of the students who punched in the requisite information, saving my aching digits much pounding. However, it was now evening, dark outside. My two friends Bill and Charles were also hanging about working with the big computer as I used a smaller one to perform the matching. Unfortunately, the matching program took hours to run so we had a lot of time on our hands. Bill brought out his frisbee and suggested our favorite game, which we called "kill-the-christian". Now kill-the-christian is a variant on a game known to regular frisbee players as "guts" where the object of the game is to catch the disk no matter how hard it has been thrown. One variation involved having a target-player in the middle of the hallway and at least one player at either end. Here we were attempting to hurt the person in the middle - but he had an alcove in which to duck should he so desire. To give you some idea of the force with which the frisbees were thrown, the hallway was about 75 feet long and disks that hit the wall were often warped by the impact. An occasional bloody nose occurred, but no serious injury ever resulted. All-in-all a great way to work off aggression. But there was, of course, some catches to the game. Innocent passers-by sometimes found themselves involuntarily included, occasionally we'd hit a window with such impact as to cause it to reverberate. Usually, however, we reserved the game for times when the building was otherwise completely deserted as it was this Saturday evening. There was one further hazard, however, as you soon shall see. Since there were only three of us we chose a shorter hallway than usual. Bill was at the far end, Charles was next to me near the front of the building. The game was being played with its usual vigor, slower shots that careened off of the walls being more dangerous than direct frontal assaults. After a while of playing I could no longer hear the chunking noise from the card reader of my minicomputer, so I ducked into its doorway to check on the progress of the program. Just a minor jam, quickly fixed, but I had had enough of frisbee. I was going back into the hallway to suggest that we take a breather when I saw an awful gleam in Bill's eyes - he really wanted to nail somebody. First he wound back and then let fly, leaving me just a moment to lean back out of the hall. The frisbee hit the linoleum just a few feet away from me and then bounced nearly straight up over Charles' head. There was, much to our future regret, an object on the ceiling that stopped the plastic platter quite suddenly. Charles disappeared in a cloud of white mist. We had finally sheared off a sprinkler head - the result was not unlike the scenes one sees on late-night TV when the submarine has developed an awful leak. Chuck emerged from the powerful spray, his shirt no longer canary yellow but now dingy gray. Then the alarm began to sound. This was not an ordinary bell, not like the bell that tells you that one period has ended and it is now time to go to the next class. No, this was a bell whose sole purpose was to drive you as far away from it as possible, to get you to remove yourself from danger. A painful, continuous din. We looked at each other and then started running about turning everything off. I ran downstairs to the computer center and had the pleasure of shoving the huge red emergency cutoff button. As soon as we'd done this, all three of us ran to where we knew the cutoff valve was located, but the door was locked. The next step was to go and find the guard in the old building. He had not heard the alarm, nor were we connected to the local fire department. He wouldn't believe how the sprinkler had been set off so he wouldn't let us turn off the water - if he had there would have been substantially less damage. He then went off to call the fire department while we stood around and waited. Since the sprinkler was near the front, open stairway, most of the water started flowing over its edge to fall two stories to the ground floor. It was a somewhat incongruous sight seeing what appeared to be a lovely waterfall among the noise and apprehension. All in all, a rather bizarre way to spend a Saturday. Zozzles The Freep