P Building and the cage

The plant where I work use to be one of the crown jewels of Motorola. Seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day this facility was packed with thousands upon thousands of employees. Any time of day you would have been hard pressed to find a parking place. One person even told me that there use to be a little grocery store on the corner where you could rent a parking place and the owner of the store would keep an eye on your car. Eventually Motorola purchased the store and tore it down to expand the parking lot.

Now that same parking lot sits mostly empty, like the rest of the parking lot. On any given day you can find a real good parking spot, even in the new covered parking. I come in at 5am and I pretty much have my pick of where I want to be. There are some cars here from the night shift of the one manufacturing area left in the facility, but they don’t take up much space. Most of the time I’m in the first row. Some of the people I work with have been here for twenty, thirty, even forty years and they look back and remember fondly how this place use to be brimming with people.

Personally I have never seen the facility like that. To me it’s an older industrial complex. They have fixed up quite a few things, but it’s mostly old furniture and old equipment. I’m in the basement and you can hear the non stop sounds of fans, compressors, air conditioners and power transformers. You don’t really notice it unless they come in for maintenance and shut a few things off, then it suddenly becomes quiet… kind of peaceful… kind of eerie.

However, nothing compares to P Building. It was once a hub of the whole facility. People packed in the hallways, even golf carts and fork lifts would go into the building to load and unload certain equipment. It’s big. From the outside you can see all kinds of pipes and chimneys and you wonder if anybody really even knows what half of it was ever used for.

I’ve been in P Building before, but never alone. We recently consolidate our labs and in the process lost a lot of storage space. No problem, facilities just moved some of our things over to “the cage”. A storage area that is just for us inside P Building. Actually there are several, owned by different groups, all with chain link fence around them and big padlocks. Unfortunately I agreed to help someone out with some hardware and found out it had been taken over to the cage. I got the key and headed over. I hadn’t been by myself before, so I got directions. Go straight in until you hit a T in the hallway. Turn left and go up three levels, then go through some double doors on the left. Sounded pretty straight forward.

I went across campus and right into the building. The doors are left open all of the time and I do mean all of the time. There are bird feathers and dirt everywhere. Already I can feel my allergies kicking into high gear and I’m starting to panic that I am somehow going to contract some West Nile/Haunta/MRSA/Bird Flu and die before I even get out of the building.

There are holes in the walls, debris is scattered all over the place. Every once in a while you see a little black box on the floor. That’s to catch the mice. I don’t know why they bother, whatever killed the bird near the entrance would probably be quick enough to catch the mice.




















See the black box in the bottom center of the picture.

It just amazes me how much stuff is left in this building. Huge areas that are gutted accept for chairs, garbage, racks that use to hold equipment and… I don’t know how to describe it. Just debris everywhere.



















Evidently they keep a couple of spare signs over here.



















The halls are literally caked with dirt. I don’t know if it is from moving stuff around or the fact that it hasn’t been cleaned in years. It’s disgusting and you can feel your feet scraping along as you go. The middle of the hallways are almost clear accept for big black marks from dragging equipment. The sides are caked in a good half inch of dirt.



















Over head you get the same feeling that you got from the outside of the building. Massive bundles of pipes and wires, cutting in and out of walls and going on for miles. There is no way that anyone really knows where they all go or what they all do. There is the constant hum of electricity as you walk, but there is no air conditioning and the building is warm, musty… there are a few lights that work, but just enough to see where you are going. Some things are just hanging by wires from the ceiling. The whole thing just feels like a nightmare sequence from some B-rated horror movie right before the unsuspecting employee gets electrocuted by the janitor that use to work there. The hallways go for ever and there are a hundred little turns. Every so often you see a well lit area, but when you look inside you see the same dirt and dust that cakes everything else.



















The directions were good. I found the cage and was even able to find the hardware I needed. As I closed up the chain link door I heard a rumbling sound creep up behind me moving very quickly. My heart skipped a beat or two and I realized that someone must be running a fork lift on the second floor above me.

I locked the gate and headed back out. Through the double doors, down three levels and back out towards the light. The trip out took a lot less time than the trip in. :)

I went back to my own area and washed my hands, face, and head. My shoes were caked with dust. I brushed off my clothes, wiped down my shoes, and headed back with a phone full of pictures.

It was kind of creepy. Really disgusting. And if I come down with some mystery disease in the next couple of days, hopefully SOMEBODY will have gotten through this whole post and can tell them that I must have caught it from P Building.