A Sweepstakes Story
Chapter 2 : Something which, at first, will seem extremely stupid
By the end of my freshman year, I had forgotten about CIA and the thrill of freezing my ass off at 5am on a sunday morning. Mike had not. In our sophmore year (95/96), he joined another organization that was on the edge of extinction : Fringe. In Fringe, Mike found his people. These were people who weren't afraid of the lathe made of a circ-saw held on your lap. These were people who knew that any problem could be solved with a thick enough layer of krylon. These people drank from the fire hose of buggy, enjoying every sloppy chaos filled moment of it. But they needed more people.
When Mike joined Fringe, they were ~6 people. I saw him working on their booth that year, just him and one other Fringe person. He had a stapler and was using it aggressively to skin a giant chess piece frame with sheets of 8x11 construction paper. I got close enough to recognize the crazed look in his eyes - it was the same look he had freshman year when he tried to vaccum up my hair while it was still on my head. I slowly backed away. The booth did poorly in judging, and Fringe's one buggy team didn't do much better.
After 95/96, A lot of folks thought this was the end of Fringe, but those folks didn't know Mike. By fall of our senior year (1997/98) they had gone from ~6 members to dozens of members. With the extra manpower, and some guidance from Karl Nott of Spirit, they were building a new buggy, Brooklyn . Sweepstakes committee created a the Spirit of Buggy award just so they could give Fringe an award.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Lets go back to 96/97, when I was a junior. Over the course of the year, I had spent some time with Mike and the Fringe folk, and by the time summer had started, I had decided I was going join Fringe the following fall. By the end of the summer, I had decided to restart CIA. Why did I change my mind? I honestly don't remember, but I think it had something to do with being fucked up drunk for 3 months straight.
Before that fatefull summer, a lifetime of manischevitz wine had killed any desire to drink. But then I went to a party and was convinced to do some tequilla shots. In the dictionary, under the heading "Getting Awesome", you will find a picture of me at this party. I then spent a majority of the next 3 months drunk. The idea to restart CIA came out of this drunken haze.
So, the fact that I can't remember what gave me the idea to restart CIA is not surprising. And if you've been a chair, you already know what I learned over the course of the year - all the really good buggy decisions get made while drunk.
Once I sobered up, I had to find out who to talk to about getting access to CIA's stuff. This turned out to be Jeff McMahill, a CIA alum, former chaiman and head mechanic, who was staff at the time. We met at the begining of the fall semester, and he showed me the CIA garage and buggy room.
This is when I learned the first of many little tidbits that I like to call "SHIT SOMEONE SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME". The tidbit : new orgs are going to get the shittiest space on campus. During CIA's declining years, they had traded away ( or been forced to give up - its unclear to me exactly what happened) a lot of its space. When I showed up, there was a wood garage ( which was filled with wood and supplies from previous Booths - all of it unusable ) and a buggy garage behind hamburg hall, and a buggy room under Maggie Moe.
The buggy room was cramped, prone to flooding, and had a small asbestos problem. Some of the more interesting things I found in the buggy room : air rifles left over from when the basement of maggie moe was a shooting range, metal helmets, an ATO chute flag, a cabinet filled with jars of unidentifiable chemicals, an aborted attempt at a monocoque composite buggy, and 2 buggys.
The garages were in far worse shape. The wood garage ( used to store booth supplies from previous years ) was filled with unsalvageable crap to the point where you could not walk into it - and I had neither the time or manpower to make it a usable space. The buggy garage was an even bigger disaster - The garage was so narrow I could stand in the middle and nearly touch both walls. The narrow space was made even tighter by various hardware and flatout trash that filled the gararge, along with things jeff had been storing there since CIA died ( including an upright paperboy arcade cabinet ). And there was a smell that took me a whole weekend of cleaning to get out. During that weekend of cleaning, I spilled something neon orange on my pants that was clearly not paint, and never came out in the wash. "Try not to think about it" became my mantra.
Despite the condition of the the buggy room and garages, the buggys I found were amazing. Conquest (92) and Stealth (86) were exactly what we needed - aluminum frame buggies that could post decent freeroll times and were as close to zero maintenance as you could get. The frame construction allowed for flexibility in driver size, which became very important when we added a 5'10" male driver to our Stealth team. The decent freeroll times meant our overall time wouldn't be demoralizingly slow, which ended up being important to proving to people we were for real. But the minimal maintenance was the most important feature. We ended up with only 2 mechanics (who both doubled as flaggers), and they liked to focus on interesting problems like getting some sleep on weekends and not failing out of school - they had not yet learned to drink from the fire hose. If they had to put all their effort into just keeping the buggy running, I doubt I could have kept them on.
It is also important to note that if I hadn't started with rollable buggies, I would not have been able to restart CIA. The only other options were buying a buggy, or building a buggy. I had no idea who to even talk to about buying a buggy, let alone having the money to do it. And there was no way I was going to attract enough people to build a buggy, let alone afford the materials and find a place to build it.
So, I had the keys to the CIA spaces, 2 buggies, an a paperboy machine. Now all I needed was a driver, mechanics, and pushers. In retrospect, sobering up was probably a bad plan.