Linstrum
05-17-2005, 11:56 PM
We were talking about a sabotaged Remington 7400 and Shooter2 said:
"Your story reminds me of something that happened to me in 1964. I had just purchased a new 1964 Mercury and was in the service bay with a mechanic who was repairing some minor problems. The next bay over was another mechanic who was removing a door rattle on a new Lincoln. He pulled the door panel off and discovered the source of the rattle... an empty fifth of bourbon. Makes one wonder doesn't it..."
Hey, there, Shooter2, Yeah, it sure does! I heard of quite a few of those car sabotage incidents over the years, too. The first one that was widely publicized was in a Ferrari or some similar Italian performance car in around 1958. A wine bottle was found that had been welded into a fender wall bulkhead and a note was inside it from a communist worker ranting about the "capitalist pigs and their evil democracy" or some such drivel. When Harley-Davidson moved their factory, more than a few of their bikes were sabotaged by disgruntled assembly line workers. One guy here locally bought a new Harley and two blocks from the dealer the transmission self destructed and split open from having some nuts and bolts placed inside it. One time I was talking to a body and fender repair shop owner and he told me that trash inside car bodies is quite common. Stuff like candy bar wrappers, beverage bottles, apple cores, banana peels, half eaten sandwiches, and very occasionally he even found used feminine hygiene items. Usually the stuff doesn’t make noise or cause any trouble, so it goes unnoticed.
Then there is my buddy who maintained and ran the Mark 2 letter sorting and canceling machines at the U.S. Post Office over in Oxnard. He said the most common thing he found loose in the mail collection bags were “conquest trophies†such as used undergarments and contraception items. Also, he warned that some people will pick up after their dogs when they walk them but don’t always put the material in the appropriate place for it and instead put it in the corner mail collection box. He said at the post office that they make every effort to clean things up and sterilize the postal equipment and any contaminated materials, but advised me to always wash my hands after looking at my mail anyway.
I have worked repairing old buildings and I have occasionally found things placed there or lost by the workers. Carpentry tools, construction blue prints, trash, old fashioned fold-up measuring sticks, notepads, pencils, and writing like carpentry math calculations. Non-offensive graffiti used to be pretty popular and I saw more than a few “KILLROY WAS HERE†in odd places, which dates things to WW2 up to the mid ‘60s. The strangest thing I ever found was a bunch of tinsel, artificial icicles, holly and ribbon front door wreaths made out of silk, and colored silver glass balls that were obviously Christmas tree ornaments inside a wall behind a fireplace. That was in the Santa Monica Mountain National Park at the Malibu area headquarters building up on Mason Ranch Road. My Dad was an electrical contractor for a few years and in one place he wired there was an electric motor gear drive that turned at about two rpm and operated an automated window opener that opened a whole row of windows via a drive shaft that ran the whole length of the building. He took a child’s novelty gag toy that made a loud farting noise when turned over and fastened it to the window operating drive shaft inside the wall about 100 feet from the motor. That was in 1958 at the old Raytheon electronics plant at Point Mugu, California, and it lasted until the building was renovated in around 1972. For fourteen years everybody there had heard the mysterious farting wall.
"Your story reminds me of something that happened to me in 1964. I had just purchased a new 1964 Mercury and was in the service bay with a mechanic who was repairing some minor problems. The next bay over was another mechanic who was removing a door rattle on a new Lincoln. He pulled the door panel off and discovered the source of the rattle... an empty fifth of bourbon. Makes one wonder doesn't it..."
Hey, there, Shooter2, Yeah, it sure does! I heard of quite a few of those car sabotage incidents over the years, too. The first one that was widely publicized was in a Ferrari or some similar Italian performance car in around 1958. A wine bottle was found that had been welded into a fender wall bulkhead and a note was inside it from a communist worker ranting about the "capitalist pigs and their evil democracy" or some such drivel. When Harley-Davidson moved their factory, more than a few of their bikes were sabotaged by disgruntled assembly line workers. One guy here locally bought a new Harley and two blocks from the dealer the transmission self destructed and split open from having some nuts and bolts placed inside it. One time I was talking to a body and fender repair shop owner and he told me that trash inside car bodies is quite common. Stuff like candy bar wrappers, beverage bottles, apple cores, banana peels, half eaten sandwiches, and very occasionally he even found used feminine hygiene items. Usually the stuff doesn’t make noise or cause any trouble, so it goes unnoticed.
Then there is my buddy who maintained and ran the Mark 2 letter sorting and canceling machines at the U.S. Post Office over in Oxnard. He said the most common thing he found loose in the mail collection bags were “conquest trophies†such as used undergarments and contraception items. Also, he warned that some people will pick up after their dogs when they walk them but don’t always put the material in the appropriate place for it and instead put it in the corner mail collection box. He said at the post office that they make every effort to clean things up and sterilize the postal equipment and any contaminated materials, but advised me to always wash my hands after looking at my mail anyway.
I have worked repairing old buildings and I have occasionally found things placed there or lost by the workers. Carpentry tools, construction blue prints, trash, old fashioned fold-up measuring sticks, notepads, pencils, and writing like carpentry math calculations. Non-offensive graffiti used to be pretty popular and I saw more than a few “KILLROY WAS HERE†in odd places, which dates things to WW2 up to the mid ‘60s. The strangest thing I ever found was a bunch of tinsel, artificial icicles, holly and ribbon front door wreaths made out of silk, and colored silver glass balls that were obviously Christmas tree ornaments inside a wall behind a fireplace. That was in the Santa Monica Mountain National Park at the Malibu area headquarters building up on Mason Ranch Road. My Dad was an electrical contractor for a few years and in one place he wired there was an electric motor gear drive that turned at about two rpm and operated an automated window opener that opened a whole row of windows via a drive shaft that ran the whole length of the building. He took a child’s novelty gag toy that made a loud farting noise when turned over and fastened it to the window operating drive shaft inside the wall about 100 feet from the motor. That was in 1958 at the old Raytheon electronics plant at Point Mugu, California, and it lasted until the building was renovated in around 1972. For fourteen years everybody there had heard the mysterious farting wall.