At night, scary wildlife comes out to play in the chemical factory Welcome to On-Call, our semi-regular-ish weekend feature in which readers share experiences that happened late at night, in odd places. This week, the tale of reader "IT Gnome" who tells us "I work on call for a chemical factory, and it wouldn't look out of place at night in a zombie film." "It's perhaps the bleakest scariest …
This has nothing to do with IT*), but with menacing animals all the same.
One summer in college I had a job working for a geo company. Basically, these guys draw a grid on the map, then go out in the field following the grid lines, poke geophones**) into the ground, drill holes a couple of meters deep, stuff some explosives***) down those holes and make them go bang. The reflections against various underground layers get picked up by the geophones, recorded, fed into a VAX11/780 and turned into a drawing showing the underground layers. From this the geophysicists would be figuring out the best spot for drilling a larger and quite a bit deeper hole which they expected would then have oil and/or gas coming out of it.
The grid lines were to be followed as close as possible, so right through fields, shrubberies, meadows, etcetera, with some correction if things were too close to buildings, roads or underground infrastructure.
One day I was working alone, staking out the grid line in a rather rural area. As I was entering a meadow, I noticed a bunch of cows in the next field, curious as t what I was doing. Cows are OK, as far as this work went, except that they tended to knock over the stakes. Not that big of a deal, as long as I could measure the distance and continue putting stakes in at the other end. And they were in a field next to were I was anyway, which I wouldn't be crossing.. Except that the gate between them turned out to be open, and one of the cows turned out to be not a cow. Who took offence with my presence, and I decided that he could have the meadow any way he liked, provided I wasn't in it.
And then there was the peacock. Who also acted rather territorial, as they tend to do. Luckily he didn't actually attack me, as I woult then probably have had to hit it with one of the marker stakes I was holding, and quite lilkely kill it.
*) except for a trailer with a VAX11/780 in it, outside the place the crew worked out of.
**) a bit like a microphone fitted to a tent peg.
***) I had a bit of fun after getting hold of one of the empty boxes, as they had "Dynamit Nobel" and various warning texts and pictograms stencilled on.
flaming gulls. Walking along a town centre seafront recently after a job and one stole a complete pasty out of my mouth just as I was about to take first bite. Fecking thing banged me on the back of the head to distract me, bit my finger, lacerating it, and then grabbed the pie in mid air as I dropped the food. Then the bloody bird flew 20 yards, settled and swallowed it in one go. I was praying the brute would choke, but no such luck. Seriously thinking of filling a pie case with warfarin and going back again and pretending to eat it to see if the bastard comes back for a second attack......500g of rat poison should be enough to kill it
I remember many days at the beach when I was young, my dad grilling hot dogs on the barbecue, and the gulls grabbing them hot off the grill. And my dad cursing and swatting at them with his grill tongs.
Later in life, I got a big thrill (no idea why) from bringing big bags of potato chips to the beach and throwing handfuls of them into the air for the gulls. If the chip bags were big enough, I could get a couple hundred gulls all hovering over me waiting for the next launch. The strange thing was that they never got aggressive or attacked me or the chip bag - they just hovered in formation, waiting for the chips to fly into the air.
And yes, I know I should not have been feeding them and enabling their bad behavior, spare me the nasty comments.
Holidaying with several mates in Newquay, these buggers would use the caravans as runways to land before hopping off to raid the bins. Every morning around dawn this happened when we'd really prefer not to be woken up. GBBGs weigh around 3/4 of a house brick (4lbs/1.8kg) and have a 5' wing span and when there's little wind they take a few steps on landing - bang, bang, bang, bang, bang on a thin metal roof!
Coming back from a cider tasting excursion, Chris laid down on the grass near the caravans, several sheets to the wind, with a nearly empty 1/2 gallon can of sleeping scrumpy in his hand he rested his eyes. The gulls were circling above so we found some bread to put around him to encourage them down but we just couldn't giggle quietly enough as these monsters were wheeling around setting themselves up to swoop in. Too young and too stupid to think of getting a camera to record this event, and way before digital cameras or mobile phones made this easy.
And there was the message written drunk that couldn't be deciphered until the writer was plastered again and could again read his drunken scribble!
Back in the day of British Rail I was stuck in Edinburgh Waverley one Sunday evening waiting for a very late train from Aberdeen to arrive. Being a somewhat poor student I consoled myself with a bag of Maltesers as I patiently waited for the damn train to get there. I dropped one of the Maltesers and it rolled off, a flock of the resident pigeons descended and they all took a turn at trying to grab it. Turns out the diameter of a Malteser is just too big for the average pigeons maw to cope with. The next hour and a half was spent replacing the eventually destroyed Maltesers with a new one as the increasingly deranged and belligerent pigeons attempted to grab these things, I was aching with laughing by the end of it.
To misquote the late great Monty Python.
When we visited CA from Australia we were struck by much bigger the gulls were (about the size of a 3yo child) , and how small the pelicans. Wasn't impressed by the dirty brown colour either.
Then there were the killer squirrels that attacked SWMBO on a beach near Monterrey
gulls nesting on the roofs of the factory units where I pretend to work (and not lay under a machine with an iPad watching cat videos... thats just a nasty rumour)
And one thing we always tell the newbie employees when they start is
"For gawds sake, park at least 10 feet away from the building"
Why?
Well because the gulls walk upto the edge of the building and take off...... and shit at the same time, leaving a great big dollop of gull crap to descend to ground level.......
'tis funny though when the boss is welcoming some prospective customers in and the gulls take off because someone got a long pole and banged on the roof ......
A chemical company I previously worked for had a lab-scale production plant deep in the woods north of Blythewood, S.C (near Columbia)
As a Brit, whenever I went there I was always thrown by the fact that some of the office staff habitually carried guns - especially at weekends. When I asked why, the answer was "big cats, snakes, coyotes and feral people". The sales manager often worked there on his own on saturday mornings and ALWAYS took a magnum (ex-Korean veteran). The place was so isolated that there was a presumed continual risk of breakin by animal and man. The plant is closed now - the groundwater was so polluted it became a superfund site (like a lot of chemical plants around Columbia) and the animals have it all to themselves, with trees growing through the buildings
Some IT angle and involving gulls... I used to work for a IT shop in brighton and we had the floor in a multistory office and outgrew it. We could only get space in the building across the road, so half the staff moved over, and they brought in a specialist company to put a high speed laser link in.
After a few weeks, we had to deal with irate people as the road between was littered with dead gulls. Some investigation revealed the birds were seeing a link and tried to land on it, whereby theyd miss, loose their footing (or winging, whatever) and dip down into the line of traffic below to be splatted.
We had to employ someone to sweep the dead bird carcasses up twice a day to keep the link up with the council and bus company etc breathing down our necks...
I work in a highly scientific laboratory with chemists, geneticists, biologists, etc. (I'm their networks guy, I don't know exactly what they do but it rhymes with "SCIENCE!") and have been alone in the labs at night a few times. I was nearly crippled with dread the first time I opened a massive heavy door with radioactive, biohazard, AND hazardous chemical warning signs on it only to step into a sampling and processing lab that was lit only by the red light of an EXIT sign and the softly blinking ambers, oranges, and green LEDs of the machines. Somewhere, a tilt-table was rhythmically clicking in place and a centrifuge started to spin up...
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