Don't Get Too Excited ...

It’s not as glamorous as it sounds.

I know what you’re thinking: “Oooh, Area 51. We’re gonna learn all about aliens, and time travel, and shadowy government conspiracies run by old white guys smoking cigarettes!”

Wrong. I’ve been at Dreamland nearly two years, and I have yet to see an alien autopsy. I’ve never glimpsed anything that looks like a UFO. I haven’t spotted any flying DeLoreans going 88 miles an hour, or stumbled across secret weapons labs, and I sure as shit haven’t seen anyone smoking. That crap’s more illegal here than working for Al Qaeda, and twice as likely to cause death.

You ask me, that Roswell "incident" was staged to get people behind the whole “Trip to the Moon” idea. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of cool stuff that goes down here, but none of it involves little green men. (Unless you happen to spill radioactive plasma on your testes -- wink, wink.)

But other than that, Area 51 is a pretty boring place to work. I’ve played more games of Minesweeper than I can be bothered to count (actually just checked: 11,634!), I’ve read the backstory of every comic book character ever created (thank you, Wikipedia), and I’ve played Scrabulous on Facebook with people from over 20 countries (current ranking: 1545). It’s so boring, kids, I’ve decided to start posting about it on this oh-so-secret blog.

Wait, you ask. If it’s so boring, what do you have to talk about? God, you’re a demanding bunch. Fine, it’s mainly an excuse for me to rant. But some part of me also hopes that by writing these entries, I’ll be able to find some meaning in something that has become so completely meaningless. And besides, a quick Google search tells me that people are pretty obsessed with the goings-on here at Homey Airport (11.2 million sites can’t be wrong). So if I keep my identity hidden, maybe I can actually find out some of the stuff that’s really happening here and (more importantly) keep myself from committing a boredom-induced suicide by jumping in the particle accelerator.

Working here is a lot like working anywhere else. Take away the bottomless government funding, the stupid codenames for everything, and the detox procedure you have to go through every time you enter the place, and it’s pretty similar to a sausage factory. I know this because I have a cousin who works in an actual sausage factory. From talking to him, we both have to deal with the same office politics, asshole co-workers, and inter-departmental fuck-ups.

Last night, for example. I’m on Day 2 of a six-day rotation. (Everyone at Area 51 works 24-hour shifts for a certain number of days, then has time off; I’m currently on the six-on/four-off plan) At 2 AM, Sanitation gets a buzz there was a chemical spill in the Experimental Weapons lab. Since I’m the guy on call that night, I pull on my Biohazard suit, head to Sub-Level 2A, and find out the stupid under-slept scientists actually dumped a container of inert plasma while trying to fill a Version 5.1 pulse rifle.

Which means I have to go all the way BACK to the supply hub and swap out my chemical vaporator for a sub-atomic nano-vacuum. Then I’m the one who gets chewed out because the crap ate through two layers of floor shield by the time I got back. But guess what, morons? You want me to clean up a PLASMA spill, it doesn’t help to tell me it’s CHEMICAL. I swear, the more PhDs they have, the dumber they act.

So that’s the basic deal. This shit hole’s a mess, but somebody’s gotta clean it. And until I hit three cherries on the million-dollar slot at Harrah’s, it looks like I’m the guy stuck doing it. But maybe writing about it here will at least make my existence seem a little bit less pointless.

NEXT UP: How I got sucked into this miserable gig.