48 KEYNOTES JANUARY 2023 WWW.ALOA.ORG BACK TO BASICS Cloak and Dagger and Other Tales Tony Wiersielis, CPL, CFDI, shows us a tiny kit with lock-picking tools and some of his recent sightings on the job. I ’m writing this during the week of Thanksgiving. I’d usually be looking forward to turkey and the long weekend to follow, but it was not to be. Instead, work descended into the surreal. Let me set the stage in two parts. Part One: I have a personal storage unit in a town south of Jersey City, where I grew up. I rented it when I sold my house and moved to New York, and I’ve been gradually cleaning it out. The Friday before the holiday, I was going through my stuff when a guy rented the space next to me. He seemed to have some “issues,” and he told me he was go- ing to live in his unit. He left for a while and came back with a boom box, a small folding table and a lawn chair. Then he went inside his unit and started babbling to himself. A moment later, as I got ready to leave, the unmistakable scent of weed filled the air. I was thinking, “This isn’t going to go well.” On Mondays, I normally work at that unnamed college in NYC. On the way there, I pass by the storage place, so I decided to stop in and grab some of my cold-weather gear. Figure 1 is what I saw at 5:45 a.m. It’s a little blurry, but that’s the garage door for my space ... With all his junk piled up in front of it. His microwave and slow cooker were across from my space! He was in his unit when I rolled up, and I made it very clear that he needed to get his crap away from my door. As it was, I couldn’t wait for him to move his stuff, so I took off without my winter stuff, which included my heavy gloves — and it was freezing out. When I got to the shop, I called the storage office, and they told me they were trying to get him out of there and into a shelter. You can’t make this up. Part 2: When I got to the shop in Manhattan, I worked on a bunch of key orders for a couple of hours. As I walked down toward Fifth Avenue to the security office to drop them off, I heard drumming and loud chanting. There had been signs posted all over the school in the preceding weeks threatening a strike by the part-time teachers. And there they were. What struck me was the large number of young people marching, chanting, waving at the cars and so on. They were too young to be faculty, so they really had no dog in the fight. Yet they were out there, basically having fun. If you could call that fun. What the teachers are striking for is full-time benefits with part-time jobs. Apparently, the size of the classes they’re teach- ing has doubled, thereby doubling the amount of work that’s done outside of class. This includes grading, making up exams and tests, mentoring, etc. Figure 1. The author’s day started poorly when someone placed all their belongings (or what seemed like it) in front of his storage unit — where his winter gear was.
