Why I went to college

When I worked for the US Geological Survey, I went to sea many times as we collected data about the ocean floor. We would go out for a month or so at a time and trace large grids as we mapped what the bottom and the layers of rock underneath looked like. Back and forth. Up and down. In good weather and bad. It all sounded so exciting at first but ended up being pretty boring most of the time. We'd put some equipment over the back of the boat and tow it around and bring the equipment back in again. Rain or shine. Ship time was expensive and you didn't want to waste a minute of it. One of the ships we used was the R/V Gyre run by Texas A & M University. It's pictured at the right.

One day as I was helping out on the deck in the rain, I thought, "What we need is some background music. Wouldn't it be more fun to work out here if we had a pleasant song playing?" So I decided to try it on my own. I always brought a tape player with me and when it was my turn to work in the lab, I'd play some music. I taped the song Singin' in the Rain (the version from the movie with Gene Kelly singing) and thought I'd play it the next time I saw people working out in the rain on the deck.

Finally, one day, when I was on watch in the lab which looked out over the back deck, it started to rain gently while people were on deck working on some of the equipment. It was time to make their work more enjoyable. I started up the tape player and held it up to the intercom and held down the Talk button. Unfortunately, when you were talking into the intercom, the speaker was turned off (so you didn't just hear yourself echoing in the unit) and I couldn't tell if the music was loud enough. So, I turned the volume up a little but I still couldn't hear anything coming from intercoms in other places. So, I held the tape player a little closer and turned the volume up a little louder. Finally, I could hear the lovely, soft sound of the song coming from an intercom down a passageway. What I failed to realize that the loud noises of fans and blowers in the lab and the fact that the doors were closed to the lab made it very hard for sound to penetrate to where I was.


I looked out the porthole to see how the guys on the deck were enjoying the music. But before I could see anything, the Captain of the ship came bursting into the lab and started yelling and swearing at me to "stop that noise". I had never seen him so mad (and never saw him that mad again). I was horrified. What had I done to make him so angry? I found out later that my "lovely, soft" music was actually incredibly loud. Apparently, the Captain was sitting in the galley (I think they called the area food was prepared and where we sat to eat it by the same name) to eat. They said my first attempt to get the music on the intercom was extremely loud and my later attempts to increase the volume only made it worse. My friends pointed out that the Captain's seat was right by the intercom and he jumped a foot when the music first blasted out of the intercom. Then he started running around trying to find out who was making the noise. As he went in and out of the galley as he looked different places, the noise increased in volume and the Captain got redder in the face.

He decided to punish the whole scientific party for my mistake by not showing a movie that evening which made me feel even worse. Now, my stupid act was affecting everyone. I went to the bridge that evening during the Captain's watch to apologize. He had finally calmed down and he accepted my apology. After a little more talking he relented and reinstated the movies for the next night. He still couldn't understand why I would do such a thing, though. He ended with, "You went to college didn't you?" The incongruity of this struck me and I was lucky to keep from laughing and enraging him again. I just had to get out of there before I broke.