The Cooler

(Originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, May/June 2018)

THERE WAS A TAPPING BENEATH MY FEET, and I knew that Rich was under the floor again. This was one of his two tricks. The other was walking around the computer room on his hands. He was a lean guy and could do this at considerable length with no problem, though when he righted himself his eyes always looked odd, bloodshot, and slightly crazed.

The first time I heard him tapping it took me a while to figure out what was going on. I thought a comupter was going amok. It was only when one of the floor tiles started to dislodge itself that I realized that someone was under the raised floor. I moved the tile out of the way, and Rich climbed out.

“Took you long enough,” he said, dusting himself off. “I could’ve died down there, and they wouldn’t have found me for days.”

“Never happen, Rich,” I said. “Someone would hear you laughing.” He laughed at that, as I’d known he would. Rich laughed at almost everything. He laughed so much that I sometimes wished that he would stop, if only for fifteen minutes. Overall, though, he was fun to work with and, for all the hilarity, he was conscientious and did a good job.

The floor was raised because of the cooling system. The computer room in which I worked for those summers back in the mid-seventies contained three mainframes. Today your phone has more power than those monsters did, but back then they were cutting edge. They were so big, and the CPUs ran so hot, that each computer had its own air conditioning unit.

There was so much cold air being created that everything in the room sat on a raised floor made up of two-foot square tiles. The cold air passed under the raised floor. All the cables linking the various computers, printers, disk and tape drives ran along there as well, keeping them neatly out of the way.

The rumour was that the heat of a CPU was so intense that you could cook a can of soup in it. Rich did bring a can of soup to work one day to test the theory, but we were thwarted by the lack of a can opener. The story may have been apocryphal anyway. But we were able to prove repeatedly that the air conditioners were so effective that you could bring in a case of beer, put it under the floor, and it’d be ice cold by the time we got off work. It worked so well, and we used it so often, that Rich and I took to calling it The Cooler.

I’d got the computer room job from a guy whose lawns I was cutting. He was a wheel in the company and offered me work as a computer operator. I thought this was funny since I knew nothing about computers and, in my computer science class in high school, I’d had major trouble making any sense of Fortran IV. But the pay was a hundred and sixty bucks a week, which was powerful money for a student in those days. The year before, I’d worked in an office for two-ten an hour, making less than a grand for the entire summer. With this job I made that in six weeks, and I worked sixteen weeks in total. I was getting rich.

I was a bit nervous about the job at first, but when I look back on what I had to do, calling me a computer operator was flattering. We’d get messages on our consoles to put such and such a tape on such and such a tape drive or to mount a particular disk on a particular disk drive. The tapes were as big across as LPs, and the disks were the size of birthday cakes and weighed several pounds. They had plastic lids with handles that screwed down from the top. You pushed a button to open the drive, hoisted the disk in place with both hands, and unscrewed the lid. In order to take the disks, out you had to fasten the lid on first and then use the handle to haul it up.

Other than that we’d make sure the printers always had paper in them, and we’d remove the documents as they were printed and separate them into the appropriate cubbyholes for the programmers from the various departments upstairs. The programmers were called “users”, which struck me as unfortunate at the time, since it made them sound like a bunch of junkies. I had no idea what any of the users did or who their clients were. Many of them were banks, I believe, and investment companies. It didn’t matter, and I could not have cared less. The money was good and the work dead easy.

At the front of the computer room, there was a counter where the users came to pick up their printouts. The locked door that led into the computer room proper was to the left of the counter and could only be opened with a numeric code. The first time I met Jerry Prince he ignored the door and vaulted over the counter, landing about three feet from me. He wore jeans and a denim jacket. His hair was buzzed short, to hide how prematurely it was receding, long before such a hairstyle became fashionable. He had glasses, a bad complexion, and a big smile. Without a word, he took the box of paper I was holding and set it on the floor. He pulled a switchblade from his back pocket and snapped it open in front of my face. With four quick slices he cut the box open and lifted the lid, handing it to me with another smile. His eyes were glittery. “I’m Jerry,” he said. “You’re the student.” Then he walked away.

Jerry turned out to know a lot about cars. I called him at home once with a question about mine. He answered the phone and, instead of “Hello” he said, “I’m sorry, the number you have just dialed is not in service.” Then he hung up. I dialed him again and this time the phone simply rang and rang.

That Monday, I said to Jerry, “I called you on Saturday and you answered the phone like a recorded message.”

“No.” He shook his head. But then, after a pause, he said, “Oh, I know. The phone company has used me in the past to record some of their messages. I guess you got one of those.”

Then there was Julio from Uruguay. He had a drooping Zapata moustache, slightly goggle eyes, a constant grin, and a ring of keys attached to his belt. He looked like a friendly prison warder.

He gave me a lot of help when I started. His hands, which he waved enthusiastically when he talked, were the size of a gorilla’s but he typed remarkably quickly and was forever monitoring the console to check the status of jobs. Although we weren’t supposed to do this except in extreme cases, users would often call Julio and ask to get their listings moved up the print queue. Accordingly, Julio would move them to the top of the list, or knock them to the bottom, depending on whether he liked the user or not.

Julio’s sense of personal space was different from the rest of ours. As Jerry described it, “He stands in your shirt pocket and yells at you.”

There were two shifts in the computer room. The first was from eight-thirty in the morning to five-twelve in the afternoon: eight hours on the job and forty-two minutes for lunch. Teams of efficiency experts must have worked months to figure that one out.

The second was a shift was from four p.m. to midnight.

On the day shift, we split up for lunch so that the computer room was always staffed. Early was at 11:30, which made the afternoon too long. Late was at 12:30, by which time I was really hungry and the morning seemed to go on forever.

The company was located in an area surrounded by a river and ravine that had been converted into a series of large and meandering parks. There were no restaurants close by and, with forty-two minutes, there wasn’t time anyway. The company cafeteria was down a couple of long corridors from the computer room, and that’s where we went every day.

Most of us brought lunch and supplemented it with a cold drink, salad, or fries. Occasionally someone bought one of the hot meals or pre-made sandwiches on offer. Julio, however, gave himself a special treat.

Every day, Julio’s wife sent him to work with a thin processed meat sandwich and an overripe banana. Every day, Julio would throw out the banana and go to the condiment counter, where he would open the sandwich, lay the bread on a plate, ladle a large dollop of Thousand Islands dressing onto each side, and close the sandwich with a look of glee. I don’t remember him ever eating anything else, and I don’t understand why he didn’t just tell his wife that he didn’t like bananas.

Most days, one of the computers would go down at least once. Almost immediately, the phone would start to ring. We knew the calls were from users wanting to know what was wrong. In anticipation, as soon as a computer crashed, one of us would call the tape library phone from the computer room and put ourselves on hold, thus eliminating having to answer the same annoying questions over and over. The computers were usually back up within minutes, and there was nothing useful we could say anyway.

One day the manager, Dan Turnbull, announced that the computer room was going to be reconfigured. This was to start on a Friday evening, and everyone who worked in the room was expected to work all night.

What the job entailed was labeling and detaching hundreds of coaxial cables from the various machines, trimming each cable to a reduced length, and reattaching the connectors to the new ends. Needless to say, this was mind-numbing work.

At around three on Saturday morning, Rich and I took a break for coffee, which came from a vending machine in a nook outside the computer room door. The coffee was dreadful, but my standards were equally low.

Rich and I slumped in a stupor against the wall next to the coffee machine. After a moment, he tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m going to tell you the funniest thing you’ve ever heard,” he said.

“Okay.”

Rich looked at me intently for a few seconds. Then, with much gravity, he said, “Shoehorn.” We laughed for several minutes.

For two summers there were a lot of laughs, not too much hard work, and many evening shifts where Jerry or Julio sent me home early, especially on Friday nights, because there was little enough for one person to do.

The third summer, a new operator arrived. His name was Andy Gutwinski, or Radwinski, something Polish anyway. I wish I could tell you what it was about Andy that I could not abide. The truth is that I have long forgotten the specifics. What I do remember is his limp handshake, his damp palm, his slumped shoulders, his watery eyes that looked away when he talked, and his embarrassingly sparse attempt at a moustache. Beyond that he exuded a clammy, shifty feeling that made me not want to be anywhere near him. He was good at his job, I guess, and everyone pretended to get along with him, but he was always on the outside of conversations, and he never seemed to get jokes.

The day Andy started, Rich slipped under the floor and knocked at Andy’s feet. I nearly laughed to see the look on Andy’s face. Rich knocked again and, finally, Andy picked up the rubber suction cup we used for lifting floor tiles. Everyone else, even the women operators, called it The Tit. Not Andy, though. When the floor tiles were moved and Rich emerged, Andy said, “That is very childish.”

Andy always looked disappointed when Jerry used his knife to open the boxes of paper. He looked upset at lunch when Julio scooped dressing onto his sandwiches. And Rich’s frequent laughter made him cringe. You could tell that nobody liked Andy. No one discussed anything with him beyond the details of business. If he drifted into a conversation it would soon wither away.

My biggest problem with him was that he seemed to like me. He would talk to me, unbidden. Mostly he talked about soccer, something in which I had absolutely no interest. But he used to go to watch the local professional team play at Varsity Stadium. Having been raised to be agreeable, I’d say sure, I’d love to go sometime. I spent the next two months coming up with excuses to get out of it.

To make up for avoiding soccer games, and to seem as if I was actually interested in spending time with Andy, I’d invite him to join the rest of us at events I knew he’d never go to. A couple of times I went with Rich, Jerry, and some other pals to the Zanzibar Tavern, a strip joint on Yonge Street. We invited Andy, but he just looked embarrassed and never showed up. I asked him to go to a Blue Jays game after Rich assured me that Andy had made it clear that he loathed baseball. I invited him to downtown bars for evenings of beer and rock and roll. As I’d expected, he declined every invitation, but I had done my duty.

The positive outcome of all of this was that Andy talked to me less and less as the months went on. What he did instead was talk to the manager.

On a day when I was planning to head to a buddy’s place right after work, I brought in a dozen beers. When Andy saw me putting them into The Cooler, he asked me what I was doing.

“I’m chilling some beer,” I said, although it should have been obvious to him.

He said nothing, but twenty minutes later, Dan Turnbull came up to me. “Did you bring a case of beer in here?” he asked.

“Not a two-four,” I said. “Just twelve.”

“Get them out of here. Now.”

“I’m not drinking them or anything,” I said.

“Now,” he said and went back to his office.

I took the beer to my car and avoided Andy for the rest of the shift.

The computers went down on a Tuesday afternoon for the second time that day, shortly after Andy had come in for his evening shift. Dutifully, I picked up the phone and dialed the library, then put myself on hold and sat back while the guys who actually knew what to do worked on getting everything back on line. I was minding my own business, reading a Raymond Chandler novel, when I felt someone staring at me. It was Andy. He was looking alternately at me and at the flashing red hold button on the phone.

“Is that one of the users on hold?” he asked.

“It’s just the library,” I told him. “It’s what we do.”

He did not respond. He picked up the phone, pushed the button to release the hold and hung up. Then he almost looked me in the eye and turned away. Immediately, the phone rang. It was a user wanting to know what was wrong and how long it would take to fix. Every time I hung up it rang again. I repeated the same useless non-answers over and over. It was a waste of everyone’s time and energy. And it was the new and annoying way of doing things whenever Andy was around.

Two days after the incident with the phones, Turnbull called all the operators together. “Under no circumstances,” he said, “are you to tie up the phone lines when any one of the systems goes down. Never again. Is that clear?”

Everyone nodded, but one thing was clearer to me than to the rest of them: Andy was a rat. No one else would have said anything, and that method had worked fine for years. Now we faced constant nuisance phone calls when we had better things to do. I looked at Andy to see how he was taking all of this. As usual, his eyes did not meet mine.

The next salvo was directed at Rich. Andy found him walking on his hands one afternoon, to the delight of everyone else. Ten minutes later, Turnbull was in the room.

“Rich,” he said, “stop walking on your hands. If you slip and crack your head open we’ll have lawyers all over us.” He paused, then added, “Given what you’ve got up there, I doubt you’d do yourself much damage, but it would hurt the company and your future with it.”

Rich and I both knew that the last thing either of us wanted was a future with the company. But that just showed how out of touch Turnbull was.

Turnbull had been one of the most popular users when he worked in department 292. He was a small, rumpled man with a thick East London accent and a pronounced contempt for bureaucracy and bosses - or so I thought. But as soon as he was promoted to computer room manager, all that changed. No more joking around about the users, at least not in his presence. And he’d walk in the computer room a few times a day for no other discernible purpose than to stride around and make sure nobody was doing anything that they shouldn’t. It made me regret any time I’d said anything negative to him about the company and its employees, even in jest, just to get a laugh, because it seemed as if he was circling around now, waiting for me to say something similar so he could pounce.

The final insult came on the night I was fired.

Leaving early was one of the advantages of working four to midnight. The idea to leave was never mine, and I never suggested it. But if the offer was made, I never turned it down. Why would I? The shift was almost always dead quiet, and by ten o’clock there was usually nothing to do but read or sit around and talk, especially on Fridays. And, in Andy’s case, talking with him was best avoided unless utterly essential.

I didn’t always get sent home, of course. When I worked with Jerry, he would usually let me go. I think because he wanted to do things that he didn’t want anyone else to see. Julio would let me go because he would have left too if he could. With some of the others, I always stayed right to closing time, and that was not a problem. I was lazy, but I wasn’t greedy.

On summer Friday nights, only the most pathetic and nerdy users were upstairs working away on who knows what. One night shortly before the end, when Andy and I were working together, I decided to clean the tape drives, which had to be done anyway. It was a tedious task, but it got me away from Andy for awhile. I was just finishing when I heard his squeaky shoes approaching. He pointed to the two drives on the end. “You didn’t do these,” he said.

“Don’t need to. They weren’t used today.”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Clean them anyway,” he said. “Just in case.” He turned, then said, “After you do that, you might as well go home. It’s pretty quiet.” This came as a surprise because it was so unlike him to do anything that wasn’t by the book.

I looked at my watch. “It’s only ten-fifteen.”

Andy shrugged. “All the drives will be clean. The tapes are filed. The paper is set for tomorrow. There are only three people on the system. There are only a few files left to print. I can do that.” He waved a hand towards the door. “You go home.”

I was never one to look a gift horse, so I gave the drives a quick wipe down, grabbed my stuff and left before he changed his mind. After that, Andy turned me loose almost every night that we worked together. Then came the Friday when it all fell apart.

It was quiet around eight o’clock. There was nothing going on, and I was avoiding Andy, who was skulking somewhere in the bowels of the room. I was being productive, writing a letter to a girl I knew who was visiting family overseas for the summer. Much to my surprise, Turnbull, who was usually long gone by this hour, came into the room and walked straight towards me.

“What are you typing?” he asked.

“It’s a letter,” I said, darkening the screen.

“Is it company business?”

“No.”

“Well who’s it to?”

“It’s personal.”

“To whom?”

“That’s none of your business.”

He looked at me intently for a few seconds and then turned and walked away, surprising me again. I kept typing, but the reprieve did not last long. A few minutes later, he returned.

“Come in to my office,” he said. When there, he said, “Everything that happens in this department is my business. Who were you writing to?”

“A friend,” I said.

“What friend?”

“It makes no difference.”

He changed his tack. “I understand that you’ve been leaving early on second shift.”

“Who told you that?”

“Have you?”

There was no point in denying it. “On any of those nights all the work had been done,” I said, “and there’s always been someone else here.”

It was over, and I knew it. And I knew why. Jerry wouldn’t have ratted me out. Julio wouldn’t, nor would Rich. Only Andy was slimy enough to have done it.

“Go home,” Turnbull said. “You’re fired. Give me your pass card.”

Handing the card over, I said, “I have some things in the computer room.”

“Get them and get out.”

Frankly, I didn’t care about getting fired. I had no interest in computers or in making a career in a multi-national conglomerate. I figured my severance would be about five hundred bucks, and I’d have no trouble getting another job. A buddy of mine had already told me that the warehouse he worked at was looking for people. But what really pissed me off was that creepy Andy had played me for a sucker, and I’d been stupid enough to fall for it. I should have known something stank when the sneaky bastard sent me home early the first time.

I gathered up my few things as well as a pen that I wanted. Andy had made himself scarce in the library, obviously knowing what was happening and not having the guts to face me. This suited me too, as I had no desire to see his smarmy face. It also allowed me to take his entry pass from the jacket that he always left hanging on the back of his chair. He wouldn’t miss the pass for ages as he never went further than the men’s room and had been there not ten minutes before. I wouldn’t need the card for long anyway.

Outside, in a dark corner of the parking lot, I watched until Turnbull climbed into his car and left. I waited a few minutes longer, then went back into the building. There was nobody around. The security guy from the front desk was either making his rounds or had gone for a leak. There must have been cleaners somewhere in the building, but they were out of sight and earshot. And I could move quietly when I needed to. Man, I love desert boots.

You have to remember how things were then, even in a huge company in a high-tech industry. Cameras weren’t ubiquitous. You could move around just about anywhere in those days without being photographed or videotaped. It was a kind of freedom that people born in the last twenty years couldn’t begin to imagine. No one was tracking your movements through your mobile phone. It was beautiful. So I was able to walk back into the building with nobody the wiser. I figured that Andy would be pleased that I was gone. He’d be sitting at his console typing code, totally transfixed by the screen.

I made my way through the deserted corridors, letting myself onto our floor with Andy’s pass. At the entrance to the computer room, I typed the code and opened the door as slowly and quietly as I could. I’d been right: Andy was tucked away at one of the back consoles.

He was sitting enraptured by the screen. The only sounds were the hum of the air conditioners and his rapid clacking on the keyboard. I went to the bank of computer disks and lifted one gently from its cradle. Then I approached Andy at such an angle that he wouldn’t see my reflection in his screen but not so far to his side that I’d show up in his peripheral vision.

I wasn’t sure what would happen to somebody who was hit in the head with a computer disk and was curious to find out. I lifted the heavy disk above my head and held it there a moment before bringing it down swiftly. Andy made a small grunting sound, and his body shook violently. Then he slumped in his chair, and that was all.

Before putting it back, I checked the disk to see that the bottom of it was not damaged in any visible way. There was a bit of blood that wiped off easily and a few hairs that I plucked away and dropped beside Andy’s chair. He had tilted sideways, but he was still breathing. I’d figured when he came to he’d have learned his lesson.

At first I was just going to leave him where he’d slumped. Then I saw The Tit sitting next to his console. I took up two of the tiles a few yards from his chair and dragged him over to the hole. He started making odd noises and thrashing around a bit, which made the job more difficult than it should have been.

I dropped his head and shoulders into the open space. Then I had to take up two more tiles and step down onto the lower floor myself, so I could grab his shoulders and pull him down beneath the supporting framework. When he was stretched out, looking more or less comfortable, I got his jacket and replaced the passcard. Then I folded the jacket and tucked it under Andy’s head, and put the tiles back.

He’d be okay. The tiles were easy to move from underneath and, if worse came to worse, somebody usually went in on the weekend. I got on the highway and headed for my buddy’s cottage. To this day, I still can’t figure out what went wrong.