PAhomepage:
NEW YORK (AP) — Three railroad workers have been suspended for turning a storage room under New York’s Grand Central Terminal into an unauthorized “man cave” with a television, a refrigerator, a microwave and a futon couch, officials said Thursday.
A Metropolitan Transportation Authority investigation found that managers at Metro-North Railroad were unaware of the hideaway beneath Track 114.
“Many a New Yorker has fantasized about kicking back with a cold beer in a prime piece of Manhattan real estate — especially one this close to good transportation,” MTA Inspector General Carolyn Pokorny said in a news release. “But few would have the chutzpah to commandeer a secret room beneath Grand Central Terminal.”
Three Metro-North employees — a wireman, a carpenter foreman and an electrical foreman — were suspended without pay pending disciplinary hearings. more
Sounds like something I might have done.
Uh oh!
We did this under the Loading Dock of the Rayburn Building back in the 80s.
(we didn’t have a TV – no reception)
Huh … didn’t realize it was a bad thing … just tryin to stay outta trouble.
Must be Union guys.
izlamo delenda est …
Big deal, it isn’t like they were stopping anyone from using it if it was needed for other purposes.
I wouldn’t blame the Metro-North employees as much as their managers who let this happen by not knowing what they were doing. The bosses no doubt were staying in their Offices (man caves).
Were they also watching porn on the city’s dime and bringing in hookers to keep them company when they were supposed to be working?
Before Cuomo-19, that space could have rented for $5K a month.
Hey Joe(Biden), is that where you have been hiding?
Do I have to but a ticket to use that room?
lol Dane Cook did that in “Employee of the Month”. Way up in the racks at the “Super Club” store, accessible only by forklift.
They must have been busted by a woman. A male cow-orker would simply have demanded in on the deal.
It was the “No Girls Allowed” sign that gave it away…
If this happened in ShamFran, that could have called it The BART Cave.
(thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week)
I can speak to this from a couple of different angles.
First, the “man cave” itself.
When I first came to work in a factory, the factory itself had just moved to the location, and it was the Wild West for a couple of years before they got settled in and started to expand. They had just moved to a building that was MUCH larger than the one they left, and we basically had one tiny corner of an enormous interior space filled and there was plenty of room for extra stuff.
One result of this was that we had a “Boneyard” on one side of the building, which is not uncommon in factories, which was comprised of old machenery, retired machenery, machenery that didn’t work any more, and machenery that wasn’t current to what the company was doing then. We had racks to the ceiling of support equipment for them too, dies, conveyor material, filteres, etc., that were mostly in giant cardboard boxes to contain them and keep the dust out, and the cardboard boxes were on pallets that had been placed in these racks by forklifts.
Some of that stuff wasn’t ever going to be used again, and some of those boxes sat there for a few years. Several years later, we had expanded to the point where we had added buildings in the area and needed that space as Production space, and so started to break down and move the boneyard to another building, throwing some things out, and going through the boxes to see if it needed to be moved or not.
That’s when we found that the Sanitation guys, who were the only third shift we had at the time, had built them a clubhouse/nap room in one of the boxes. This was not a little box, it looked something like this, but with a cutout in the back.
https://static.grainger.com/rp/s/is/image/Grainger/55VL56_AS01?hei=536&wid=536&$adapimg$=
Not as elaborate as what these NY guys did, but they had sleeping bags, snacks, radios with headphones, porn magazines (pre-smart phone, that was how porn was availabe, and, yuk), even a small, battery powered BW TV set, so they would apparently just go camp out there for awhile while they were supposed to be working.
Boss wasn’t happy about it, but we didn’t have security cameras there and then (pre-9/11), so he couldn’t fire anyone over it. Not sure what he did with the TV and radios, but I’m pretty sure they never went back to their orignal owners. Not that it woudn’t have happened anyway, but the porn magazines were plenty of incentive to put the sleeping bags and entire rest of the container in the dumpster.
Now from the point of view of the second part the location.
The article says “Railroad officials said the space presented a fire hazard because rescue workers would have had difficulty accessing an unmapped room.”,
well, there’s something to that.
Basement bedrooms were, and are, illegal in the county I ran in because of the limited access and liklihood of a fire when someone who smokes sleeps in it, among other things, but they were also very common and I spent a lot of time in basements knocking down mazes of plywood partitions to get to the flaming mattress that was invariably in the furthest corner of the room from the staircase. This involves a LOT of extra manpower to do it safely, usually at LEAST a four man hose crew, because you drop a guy at the corner you have to turn to get to the staircase (usually in the back of the house and you usually come in the front), another guy at the staircase, and a guy at other bends you might find, and it’s best if you have a guy backing up the nozzleman too. You can see where you run out of guys quickly this way, and it’s something to watch the flames fan out over your head in a basement fire, because they do just that…
https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-9962390-flames-roll-across-ceiling
…not to mention most basements are DANDY ovens becuase there’s nowhere for the heat to go but up and there’s generally not great ventilation there so you can get into a flashover pretty easy, even a backdraft if the doors are tight.
It’s not a joke because a neighboring deparment lost two members in a basement fire from an illegal grow operation in someone’s basement when the fire ate a support joist and dumped part of the first floor on their heads. There’s other issues with that too, like some things they had down there like a refrigerator ran constanly and for long periods of time without human supervision, probably no fire alarms or sprinklers if it’s just a mainenance closet, and their efforts at concealment may just make it harder to fight a fire if one did break out in there. Also, if someone is there, presumedly they’re there in secret, so if they had a medical problem in there, how long would they lay there, until someone wondered what that smell was? And also, they say it was UNDER a track in the complex somewhere. Not sure how it’s built and don’t know a ton about railroad tracks, but it seems like if you did have it become a burn room, that it would weaken an area under the tracks and cause an issue for a heavy, people-filled vehicle as well.
So generally speaking, yeah, it probably wasn’t a great idea to have it down there, setting aside all the other issues with it. Pretty sure they’re union and have a break room, maybe they should go use that…
If I were their lawyer:
“These unappreciated, hard working people are improperly suspended for creating an employees expedient recreation and break room from unused, vacant space. They even volunteered to do the work and add the furnishings and entertainment without charge to their employer.”
Just call it a safe space POC workers…
Lex Luthor, Miss Teschmacher, and Otis?
Reminds me of a commercial about 20 years ago. A young couple go into a department store so she can look for clothes. The husband sits on a couch in the ladies department, looking bored. Then he sees an extension cord leading to one of those round clothes racks. Following it, he goes in and sees 3 guys grilling hot dogs, drinking beer, and watching a portable TV, and they tell him to c’mon in and join them. They apparently made a man cave while their wives were shopping and trying on different dresses, etc.
I thought it was pretty creative and funny as heck, but I don’t even remember the product that the commercial was pitching.
What’s odd is: what’s the problem having a break room where you work?
That said, if these guys used it to skip out of work, it’s another story.
So… ??
I’m not surprised. I would see lots of things in those tunnels for over 28 years while riding Metro North into the city. I would see men (always a man) walking around while the train just passed by them. You could see bottles and food packaging. Sometimes a light was on in a room down there. One thing is they always wore hard hats in the tunnels so at least there was one rule they followed.
God Bless us all!
TimBuktu
SEPTEMBER 25, 2020 AT 11:21 AM
“Reminds me of a commercial about 20 years ago….”
…it was a Bud Light commercial.
…here it is…
https://youtu.be/MCP00lbQM-I
Oh boy, the He Man Woman Haters Club – no gurlz allowed – sign on the door gave them away.
https://miro.medium.com/max/500/1*0zqRUacy_9aGYtalPkJuIg.jpeg .
@Super
Thanks – it brought back memories…a great commercial.