I had occasion to post a short story on usenet news, all true, about the time I almost lost my father his job. It involved a small metal box on a three-foot-tall post, next to the place where all the airplanes were parked. And boredom. I was only 6 or 7, after all, and the conversation up by the hangar was boring. Boring.
Anyway, there was a walkway down to the ramp area, and this box on a post. The door on the side of the box was open, a bit. There was this little lever inside.
It's amazing how much noise the air-crash crew at a Naval Air Station makes when the alarm goes off.
Apparently they wrote the whole thing off as an unplanned exercise. I never heard anything about it, and after all, I lived. And they did not fire my dad.
So after the posting, I get an email from a lady named Mary Shafer.* She asks, Are you the Fred Drinkwater from NASA? Because this story is very familar.
Turns out she was in the group up by the hangar that day. And no, I was not the guy from NASA, just his little kid. Same name, though, more or less.
* Ms. Shafer was heavily involved in the SR-71 program at Edwards AFB / Dryden FRC, and this was probably around the time that Ames had an F-104 program down there, hence the connection.
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