Mountains of Paper - Part 2

The new building had room for 5,000 and I was one of the last ones hired to fill it.  Hydro was going full-hog to build Darlington on their own.  The previous plants had been built by aecl.

It was amazing that more than half the building was filled with support people to the engineers and scientists.  I met one girl I knew in high school.  She was an environmental scientist and the irony was that the horrible air was killing her.  She was having a nasty cold almost every month.  The building filtered out the weak, and I never saw her again.  I think the place had a higher percentage than covid.

In an homage to paper, the building had a brand new dumb-waiter system.  It would grab plastic baskets from Central Mailing, and dump them on the right floor.  It handled tons of paper a day, the floors groaned from all storage cabinets.  It was always breaking down and spewing paper everywhere.

You can't understand how horrible we engineers were with women.  We had no hormones and didn't react to hormones.  The very few women in engineering were awesome, as they had to be 10 times brighter than the average.  I talked to them, but it was like they had x-ray superman glasses, and looked right through me.

Yet the building of paper needed endless amounts of female clerical staff.  They were all English Majors who were happy to get a job that paid twice as much as average.  Although I would never say it, they had an eye on marrying an engineer, they all did, eventually.

OMG, being surrounded by wonderful girls was paradise!  They all started out being a mail-girl for a few months, and then were promoted to handle the tons of paper.  A bunch of us young ones would go out with a group of them.  We even went to a cottage together.  None of us knew what girls wanted, but they were patient.  I didn't realize it at the time but 1980 was peak paper, peak electricity demand, and peak bureaucratic employment.  It was also peak purchasing power for engineers.  I had a lovely apartment looking over the city, and a k-car in the garage.

-to be continued.