Date:         Tue, 21 May 96 20:03:07 CDT
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         Joel Walker <JWALKER@ua1vm.ua.edu>
Subject:      Re: Non-VW heater story...

On Tue, 21 May 1996 16:28:06 -0500 Jeffrey Olson said:
>... felt the wonderful relief of a cool 106 degree wind coursing over us.

ha! that reminds me of my youthful (and stupid) days, aworking on the chain
gang (actually, the city water works in my home town). :) the city fathers
had gotten off their collective buttocks and financed a badly needed new
water tank, one of the new squat models (no legs), and a whopping half-a-
million gallons!!! :) well, anyway, some klutz in the chain of command
decided that it needed to be "tested" over the weekend, so they filled it
with water (which is what you usually do with water tanks) ... but someone
had forgotten that the contractors had NOT painted it yet. :)

so we had to drain it, and since the floors of those things are NEVER flat,
there was still about 500 gallons left in various puddles here and there
... and guess who gets to mop it up. inside a steel water tank. in July.
in Alabama.

yup. us. me and the other convicts. ;)

we started out by taking off our shirts and shoes/boots. after about 15
minutes inside, we figured out that we weren't gonna make it for very long
at one stretch, so we started taking shifts and stripped down to our
underwear.

only trouble was ... when we stepped out of the tank, into the 98F+ degree
heat and humidity of the outside, we froze!!! goosebumps as big as golf
balls!!! it actually hurt.  we figured (no thermometer on the truck) that
it must have been about 130-140F inside that tank.

eventually, we did get all the water mopped/suck/soaked/swept out ...
along with all the sweat we added to it. and we convinced the chain of
command that it was a VERY bad idea to do that again. :)

joel