The Movie Scene - John Dunn, Consultant, Ambertec, P.E., P.C.

I once worked in mid-town Manhattan in the McGraw-Hill Building on Sixth Avenue, right near the Radio City Music Hall and Rockefeller Center. I'd take the Long Island Railroad in to Pennsylvania Station, then take a northbound subway to 47th Street and then walk the rest of the way through a veritable sea of humanity.

On the way, I would sometimes see familiar faces of television personalities, the down-and-out homeless, lots of microwave relay trucks with television network names on their sides and doors marked with "Danger Radiation" notices near their microwave dish antennas and unbelievable numbers of beautiful young women dressed to the nines!

So far as I know, nothing like this has ever existed anywhere else. I'm quite certain that there isn't anyplace else like that on the planet.

In addition, there were all kinds of very strange people trying to hand me tickets to "the show". That was something of which I wanted absolutely no part, so I became quite adept at sidestepping them, avoiding all of their attempts to block my path. On any given walk, there could be dozens of them to avoid.

Then one day, as I was making my way back to work after lunch, this young fellow tried to approach me in the classic "I wanna hand you something" style and I saw it coming. Evasive maneuvers were taken and I got past him, albeit rather aggressively on my part because he himself was being quite aggressive.

Next thing I knew, there I was in the middle of a movie-shoot with the leading man and leading-lady who were both dressed in nineteenth century costumes both staring at me and with two cameras pointed my way.

I scrammed.

In retrospect, I realized that this young man had only wanted to stop me from spoiling a movie scene which was being filmed. He had failed. (I have long legs.) However, why hadn't some kind of warning signs been put up saying something like "Filming In Progress"?

 

When I designed 50,000 volt power supplies and had them on the bench for test, "Danger High Voltage" signs were posted. I never assumed that somebody coming along would just somehow happen to know what was going on.

I guess my Hollywood career is pretty much over at this point.

Comments

[John Dunn]

A bit more about warning signs.

Those "Danger High Voltage" signs were just that of course and written in English which unfortunately, a number of janitorial staff couldn't read!

Workers would come in and move the safety barriers around in order to sweep up and never know how close they were to that 50000 volts. Posting multi-lingual signs such as "Peligro Alto Voltaje" in Spanish for example, might have been useful, but then not everyone knew Spanish either.

Therefore, supervisors were alerted and required to instruct their staff to be aware of what the warning signs meant, even if they couldn't be read.

Nobody was ever harmed, thank goodness.

[Mary Winch]

There was another incident of an unusual number of patients dying in one hospital room on certain nights of the week. A houskeeper who didn't read English unplugged oxygen equipment and other life support systems on his/her night shift job to plug in the vacuum.

[Jon Point]

Oh yes. The lab had "Danger High Voltage', 'Danger 33,000V', 'Danger - High Voltage Testing', 'No unauthorised entry' and a few of those signs that show someone dancing with sparks etc. All of this was on the doors to the lab. One day, whilst testing a prototype for breakdown (which is fun because you always get a bang...), a salesman with a client walked straight through the door as device breakdown occurred (read; a huge bang and flash, followed by smoke). I was ready for it, the others weren't, which led them to cower on the floor behind the test set. Suitably deafened and blinded, they then staggered away!

So what use were the signs? None. They had to ban these folks from the building entirely using swipe cards...