Interview by Brian Gottesman

Q: How many years have you been here?

A: It’ll be twenty-three years around June 30th.  1981 was when I started.  I actually worked on this building before any of the faculty was here, working for a construction company.

Q: What’s changed in twenty-three years?

A: Wow, what hasn’t changed.  Except me of course!  [laughs]  A lot has changed, especially with all the new faculty coming in over the past few years.  You know, you can see the changes in the department, the physical change and stuff like that.  It’s all around us.

Q: Does it seem that the Grad students get younger and younger?

A: Yeah!  The majority of the people stay the same age around here.  It keeps you young, keeps you going.  It’s a great environment, I think, to work in.  I’ve always said that.

Q: What have you found people need more of as each year goes by, in terms of things that you're asked to build into the labs?

A: When I came here when you had a dummy terminal out in the lobby here.  We had the C70, and I guess for a few directors it was a chore to relieve us of that monstrosity!   But I think I see more and more that we’re losing hoods, at least for the biochemists.  For this latest project, for Professors Sanes and Lichtman, we’re putting in imaging facilities, more dry-lab type stuff and computers.  So I see a shift over to that.  Everything's more computerized.  I've seen the whole evolution since I’ve been here, from the dummy terminals and running hard cables myself from here to the BioLabs.

Q: If you can overturn one building related decision of the past twenty-three years what would it be?

A: Well, there are things that we're changing today that were designed when the building was built that I still work on, like the fan coils and stuff like that. I think in the beginning that there were just a lot of things that were designed that were problematic that if I had the chance to go back and change, knowing what I know now, would be a lot different.  Mostly the cooling systems. You know, each lab does different things, so for you to have an air handler supplying air to ten labs, the same air with no temperature difference, and they call for different temperatures, that's a problem.  So we put fan coils in.  In the winter we can pretty much control it but in the summer whatever came off the air handler for those rooms, that's what they got.  If it was 55 degree air everybody got that, there was no way of tempering that.  Now, at least in the summer we have chill water fan coils that can actually cool rooms down instead of them overheating.  So, that's a problem from day one that I didn’t have anything to do with.  For the most part everything else is good.

Q: The biggest project you had to work on in the last several years was the Bauer Center and the Sherman-Fairchild courtyard.  How has that turned out?

A: Like all projects they have a certain amount of difficulty and it just gets worked through.  People try to strive together to make the building come out like it has. Bauer as it is now functions very well.  Every once in a while we’ll come into something, but for the most part there were a lot less bugs in Bauer than there were in Sherman Fairchild.  Mechanically, really there weren’t any short-cuts with Bauer.  Mechanically-wise it's a great building.  Function-wise, to me it seems like it works well, but I’m not in a lab so it’d be something you’d have to ask the scientists about.  But it works well.  It’s very organized, utilities and everything else so it’s a good building to run.

A: At present, a typical day is I come in at 8:00 and I usually head down to the construction site on the first floor.  I check the first floor and the second floor and talk to the super on the job, see if there’s any problems, how the work went that we had scheduled and stuff like that.  So I spend some time there just going around.  Then usually nine o’clock rolls around and I usually have a coffee break and go down to the shop with the guys and I get information down there, the current events of what’s going on around the area.  And then you have some scheduled things.  Sometimes you never know where the day’s going to go.  Other times, no matter what happens you just have to take care of your priorities.  On most days one thing just leads to another. You’re up looking at something and then someone says that this is a problem, and the end of the day gets here and you’re like: “Wow, its five o’clock”!  It’s interesting.  Every once in a while you get a little bored, but for the most part there’s always something going on, something different.  There’s just so much, you can easily keep yourself busy all day long.  During slow times generally what we’ll do is a lot of cleaning.  We’re kind of in the cleaning process now.  I like to keep the mechanical rooms pretty spic and span, so right now with things going on we’re trying to clean those up, get the contractors to take their stuff out.  We just shift sometimes.  Sometimes we’re really busy and we focus on certain things, and when it starts to level out then we go to things that no-one would know we’re doing because it has no affect on them.  It’s the behind the scenes stuff.

Q: So you have one of those jobs where if no one notices you doing your job then you’re doing your job correctly?

A: Hopefully. The less we can affect the faculty the better off it is for all of us, so that’s what we try to do.  

Q: What are the big crises you’ve had?

A: [laughs] Well, the first one that comes to my mind was in the late-80's.  ­­­[Professor] Matt Meselson was getting interviewed,  I think it may have been Time Life.  They were set up in the seminar room, which has a lab kitchen above where they do the autoclaves and the glass washers.  Lo and behold, not more than minutes before things were supposed to start, water started coming down through the ceiling!  For some reason, it just started coming through and they were all set up and I’m like: “Oh my God”! [laughs]  So we got everything cleaned up, hustling around.

Another time, back in the mid-eighties, my boss told me that we need to make sure we shut down the sprinkler systems for the winter.  For some reason I forgot to turn them off.  So we came in one day and the stairs, all the surrounding trees and grass and property that the sprinklers took care of were an ice castle!  We came in and it was an ice palace.  I got tons of calls.

We’ve had a few power failures.  I think the last one was last summer or the summer before, and it was pretty intense because we’re really concerned about the minus-eighties.  Those will hold forms until like, minus fifty-nine, and then it becomes critical: they start changing their form.  We got pretty close to that. 

Q: Don't the generators kick in?

A: Yes, but these weren’t on emergency power.  They’re on emergency power now.  After that incident, we tried to get some money to do that, and we have the majority on emergency power.  We also have the nitrogen backup tanks on specified ones.  We asked the group which ones they’d like and they picked them.  So that helped.  But it’s always at the back of my mind.  Sometimes at night I’ll get calls about the minus-eighty.  One time I had to come in myself.  We couldn’t get in touch with the person and I had to literally take all the stuff out of the chest freezer and put it into one of our spare freezers.  I don’t look forward to that.  [laughs]  I think anything that could directly affect the research, that makes me the most nervous.

Q: What do you like most about your job?

A: I like that everyday you never know what's going to happen.  I mean, that can be good and bad, but it's a bit challenging to get things done.  I get a sense of reward out doing what I do and knowing that I'm a part a piece of what been going on around here, to try to keep things running.  That’s my part of the research around here, to make sure that they can do what they need to do.

Q: What do you dislike most about your job?

A Man and His Bike

Q: What skills have you added to your portfolio since you came here in 1981?

A: Let's see… People skills.  A lot of financial skills, dealing with the budgets and stuff and actually coming in on budget. Computers: basic programs, nothing special, like DDC and the Siemens controls for the building.  So, yeah, I've learned a lot.  I've developed a lot of skills here.

Q: What do you foresee for the next twenty-two years?

A: Fishing and motorcycle riding. [laughs]  No, I don’t know.  I think I’ve got about fifteen years left.  I think there’s just a lot of stuff going on, a lot of buildings going up, new things happening.  The department is continuing to change.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens, see the science.  I mean, I hear a lot about it.  I don’t ask a lot of questions but I know its happening and I know there’s a lot of stuff on the cutting edge around here.

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