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2004-11-26 - 4:10 p.m.

Turkeys in Space

Warm stuffing for breakfast. I love Thanksgiving. And, I meant to work today, but I goofed out. Ah, well, there�s still tomorrow or Sunday. We just have so many deadlines in the next weeks. Just ask my team about the pressure -

... and Theo's cruel. She's going to make us work through the holiday, said my team as about four of them trooped into my office Wednesday.

I roll my eyes. Look, first of all, I am not making you work through the holiday. Second, do not talk to me about working on Thanksgiving cause I have eaten turkey from a NASA control center.

It occurs to me, I've never written that story down.


How does a control center really work? You know those pictures of mission control, Houston? For the fifty personnel in that room, there are rooms off camera with, one to five people backing up each person on the floor.

For TRMM (best known to my friends from The Monkey on my Windshield story, there were three senior engineers from my group are in the main control center, and I was with the five others monitoring the thousands of pieces of data in another room, feeding information up the chain. Except our room was in another building, the peons segregated from the senior engineers, with the support teams totaling another fifty personnel.

In the final days of launch campaign, we spent endless hours rehearsing for launch day. I still have the 120 page document describing step-by-step what we were doing from T-10 hours to T+4 hours. That rocket jockeying thing you see in the movies where they jury rig on the fly? Not real. And it makes me crazy, which is why watching me watch Armageddon is fine spectator sport. But, I digress.

So, there we were at all hours of the day and night, ten, twelve hour shifts practicing and drilling. Occasionally, the management would spring for pizza to perk us up.

Except, they usually forgot to send anything over to the peons. All the treats wound up in the main control center while we were stuck at our posts with no pepperoni.

So, when launch day fell on Thanksgiving, we peons had had enough and planned our own potluck dinner. With people running on pure adrenaline, we went a little overboard.

The senior staff got wind of our plan, and hinted we should knock it off because the head of our space center was going to bring in dinner for the troops working T-Day.

Right.

We rebels hauled in our crockpots and cutlery, side dishes and gravy, and set a full table, down to linens and a nice centerpiece (mums) with a lovely dessert buffet on the sideboard. Konichiwa Harry even brought in a full-sized microwave, cause that was the only way he knew to cook corn (his assigned dish). Trays of appetizers were taken into the control area and plopped on top of the data racks.

But, our leader did turn up, shame on us peons of little faith.

He walked in with two boxes (ream of paper size) full of a Safeway Thanksgiving dinner - the entire kit and caboodle - turkey, dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy, pumpkin and apple pie.

All frozen solid.
Ice cold, frozen solid. The mashed potatoes were particularly admirable, having been pressed into a perfect brick, suitable for building an igloo, but not so much for eating.

With barely a handshake, he left the boxes, along with a twenty-four pack of hot soda and a bag of ice melting on the conference table and exited stage center to join the muckety-mucks.

Huh.

You ever tried to thaw a frozen turkey? Our comm. team, who didn't have much to do in first forty pages cause their transpoder was off, performed a defrost-and-microwaving ritual for an hour, draining two large Chinese soup containers full of grease from what turned out to be an undercooked bird.

After that, we crammed the rest of our bounty into the freezer of the lunchroom fridge. Handily, all those brick shaped dressing and potato lumps stacked neatly into the limited space. For all I know, they are still there.

Still, the potluck dinner was on the table by T-1 hour, when the senior engineers came over the comm. While the secretary was still working on defrosting their bricks and coping with the lack of paper products (dinner came without plates and forks - so it's good the team had much chopstick experience from working in Japan), they'd thought to check on us.

Our test director offered them a piece of cheesecake.

Cheesecake? was the puzzled question, since their government issue mealpack had come with same frozen pies we�d exiled to the freezer.

Sweeter still was when she listed the nine, yes nine, kinds of cheesecake then started on the range of homemade pies also crowding the sideboard.

I told you, we were running on pure adrenaline. All contributors, swept away by esprit-de-corps, went a bit overboard.

There was a long silence from the main ops room, then, finally, Okay, then, came over the loudspeaker. At about the same time our phone range with my lead asking his support team what was up with the cheesecake.

You never do get over that schoolyard satisfaction of savoring petty revenge.


I suppose things like this are why, now that I'm on the senior staff, I still haul in beer and brownies for my team. Or it could just be my raisin'.

Still, two important lessons here.

First, if you're trying for a nice gesture, finish the details that make it a nice gesture. Ice the beer, bring napkins, have a knife to cut the brownies. Don�t leave a melting bag of ice on a conference room table without cups or a cooler.

Second, take care of your people. Say thank you for their efforts.

In fact, we should all take some time over this holiday to say thanks.

Call the far-flung relatives. Call those friends you think of wistfully each time you dust off the Christmas card list and mourn over how you've lost touch with so many people.


Scribble to Theo

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