Nerd: Another Strange & Terrible Saga

 We all called the guy "Nerd." Of course, he had a real name, but I didn't know it then or now. For this I am eternally grateful.

He was a type specimen. If they had such things in the Field Museum in Chicago, he'd be stuffed and on display, the paragon of his subspecies. I'd say he was straight out of the "Revenge of" movies, but those didn't come out for 10 or 12 years after "Nerd" fell off my radar. White socks, black oxford shoes, highwater slacks, button down white short sleeve shirt, a pair of calculators dangling on his belt, pocket protectors, all that jazz, he was the full tilt boogie of Nerddom.

We took a class called "Air Pollution Control & Abatement" together in the early 70s. Think about it. Anybody, myself included, who took Environmental Science classes back then was a nerd. And Nerd stood out among us. 

[ A stock photo of  

"A Man Out Standing In His Field" 

goes here but is not included,  

because I am cheap.]

The prof was an environmental chemist. One afternoon, he arrived and excitedly began scribbling chemical formulae, seemingly random physics expressions, and what might as well have been astrological hoodoo on the chalkboard, left to right, five rows, then moved to the board on the right side of the room, lecturing as he filled it. Then he shifted his attention to the back wall of the classroom, ending with a dramatic equality midway across the last row of chalk.

As performance art, it was phenomenal. He began with the variables: how much coal was burned per hour, the sulfur content of the fuel, wind speed, smokestack height, distance, adiabatic lapse rate, wind shear, and a few other bits of meteorological esoterica. The result predicted sulfur dioxide levels at a specified down wind location. This was the early 70s; acid rain was still a thing. I'm pretty sure this was the first time it had been modelled on a computer.

The class was stunned. The best I could do was a block diagram (chemistry, physics, hoodoo, rinse and repeat), understanding few details. Some tried to copy to their notebooks, but it was futile.

And then there was Nerd. He had unsheathed both of his calculators, slide rule clenched in his teeth, and was actually solving that monster!

Nerd was on the verge of the answer when the professor said, "This sort of thing is so time-consuming to do, nobody does it.  But you will never have to do it to know the answer." Then he told us the FORTRAN program to use at the university computer system and the data format for our punch cards, class dismissed.

Nerd was deflated needless to say. It was almost - and may have been - audible.

The printout we got at the computer center was detailed enough to present to the then-new EPA.  Which was the intent: the professor made a lot of money with that program back in the day. Good on him. He was a mensch.

[I finished undergrad and worked as a lab tech at the regional marine lab for a couple of years. It was fun, clearly I'd need a master's degree to get a decent salary, and the federal grant that was paying me expired. So I went back to school.]

I enrolled early on in the companion to the air pollution class, "Water Pollution Control & Abatement." The chemistry was more my speed, mostly tests I already knew from the marine lab or my freshwater biology classes.

One of the field trips in the class was a visit to the Jackson Terry Road sewage treatment plant, then the largest and most sophisticated in the state. My, my, how things have changed.

After a quick drive-around tour, we began a guided tour beginning with a tank where giant grilles fished what the guide euphemistically called "insoluble debris" - baby diapers, feminine hygiene products, condoms, trees, styrofoam, almost anything that would float - out of the reeking fetid effluvia of the capitol city. On we strolled, past tanks that churned and aerated brazillions of gallons of municipal sewage in various stages of decadence.

Finally we arrived at some placid ponds where biology was winning and the ponds were essentially purified. Mallards were cruising across the water, backlit by the sunset, a tribute to the power of biochemical oxygen demand and civil engineering. At that point, our docent's walkie-talkie squealed. Shift change! We waited while the night shift manager walked out to complete the tour.

Which was Nerd, now the night shift foreman at the biggest shit processor in the state, excluding the Legislature. And sure enough, in the great tradition of sanitary engineers he downed a ladle full of the "outfall" as it spewed from the last pond into the Pearl River.

Anyone wanna argue karma?

I started focusing my career goals on science education instead of environmental engineering. (And I took FORTRAN the next semester.)