The truth of dead people and storage

Someone once told me that every manager who stay in the game long enough will get one dead body. I don’t know what it says about me but I have had two.

The story of the first dead body-

Some time around 1995 I was working as the onsite maintenance at Space Bank in Pasadena. A wonderful facility 8.5 acres of old Navy base. As the summer started heating up the smell of dead rodent started getting pretty strong in the “W” building and as maintenance I started the hunt. From time to time a mouse will get into a unit so we kept a really potent poison in the ceiling. The mice go after the bate and die quite quickly. The poison dehydrates the rodent and you end up with a mummified Mickey that stops smelling.

As soon as you smell one you have to find it before the smell stops. With in 5 days I hadn’t found my mouse friend but the strange thing was the smell was getting stronger. I finally got to the point where we started cutting locks to track down the smell.

Three weeks later we have entered every space in that hallway with no luck. The summer temperatures are going up and the smell is getting worse. That is when a little luck solved the mystery.

During the day it was standard procedure to walk the grounds and check doors. On the Mini Storage side of the property we are looking for dummy locked doors and doors without locks. There was a large section of the property that was built into a industrial park. This side was 24 hour access and we didn’t have a need to check doors. Well fortunately or unfortunately one of the weekend crew checked the door to one of the industrial spaces that happened to back up to the building with the “W” hallway. Well the answer to the smell was laying half on a couch half on the floor in front of a space heater.

An industrial tenant who happened to have cancer had overdosed on his pain meds and had passes away in his shop. Why no one had not noticed he was missing can be put down to many reasons, but my belief was he had alienated himself from his family. We would not start looking for him till his rent came do.

Living in L.A. county does make for some interesting meetings. There were two ladies who were on the scene as coroners on the OJ Simpson Double Homicide. One spent a year on television at the trial the other one got to come to Space Bank and help us out. It was this lady who taught me how to get decomposing human out of cement. The secret is kitty litter lots and lots of kitty litter and a strong stomach. It took two weeks and a about 20 lbs of the litter. You lay it out then in the morning scrape it up. Repeat till the litter stays dry. I really hope I never have to do that again.

Scraping human de-comp, can that be put on a resume?