Since You Asked

The generic name for the Dorr-Oliver was "save-all", but we commonly called our equipment by the name of its manufacturer.  The Dorr-Oliver was part of our water clarification system.  Paper machines use a lot of water, and most of that water is clarified and re-used.  When water comes off of the paper machine it's all clouded up with bits of paper stock.  That stock has to be filtered out before the water can be re-used or it will plug up the showers.  What the Dorr-Oliver did was separate the stock from the water, return the stock to a stock chest to be re-fed to the paper machine, and send the water to another piece of equipment called the Sveen, which further clarified the water by a different process.  The stock that came off the Sveen was unfit for re-use and was sent to another piece of equipment to be de-watered further and discarded.  The water was as clean or cleaner than it was when it was originally pumped out of the river, and could either be sent to the paper machines or sent to the surge chest, where it was held until needed or returned to the river if there was way too much of it.

The Impco sat next to the Dorr-Oliver and worked on the same principle, but it was much bigger and better.  When I first came to the beater room, the Impco was having some issues and couldn't handle all the water, so the Dorr-Oliver was being used to handle the surplus.  During an extended period of down time, we worked on the Impco and resolved all its issues.  Now it could handle all the water, but the Dorr-Oliver was kept in reserve just in case.  The Dorr-Oliver was made of old fashioned carbon steel, not stainless steel like the Impco, and it went to rust during its idle time.  By the time of my story, the Dorr-Oliver hadn't been used in years, and we probably couldn't have used it if we needed to.

The committee I was on had nothing to do with the union.  It was a multidisciplinary task force that was brought together to plan and implement an extensive upgrade of our control system.  They wanted some operators on the team, as well as the usual managers and engineers, to provide input so the new equipment would be more user friendly than some of the crap machines they had bought in the past.  All the beater room operators were not on the team, so I was tasked with getting their input about what to do with the old Dorr-Oliver.  I don't know why the Dorr-Oliver was never scrapped out.  Perhaps the money that had been appropriated for its disposal got siphoned off into another project, or maybe it was because Mitch was indeed a crackpot and nobody took his idea seriously.  When I conducted my poll, I refused to divulge the name of the originator of the idea, as was recommended by my colleague George, but everybody on the committee knew it was Mitch.  The whole point of my story was that, even a crackpot can come up with a good idea now and then.  I have always believed that a practical idea like that should be judged on its own merits.  Like I told George, "This is about 20 tons of scrap iron, not somebody's girl friend."  I guess I always thought that most people were like me in that respect, and I never realized how unique I was until Bruce pointed it out to me.

The Northern Lights generate a faint hissing sound that can only be heard under ideal conditions.  Other people besides me have reported this, so it's not just in my head.

I have eaten Dinty Moore beef stew a few times since my Alaskan odyssey.  It's okay, but nothing to write home about.  The reason I chose it for my trip was it represented a somewhat balanced meal that was easy to prepare and didn't need to be refrigerated.