Employee Of The Month
Instituted in 1956 to recognise, monthly, the man or woman whose work that month the President could not stop talking about. A photograph on the commissary wall, a citation in the Bulletin, and twenty dollars from the tin. Personnel adds a status column, at the request of Records, and asks that it be read straight down.
Every month I pick one. It is the easiest decision I make, because every month there is one person in this building who did a thing nobody asked for and it worked, and that is the whole qualification. There is a photograph. There is a citation. There is twenty dollars. I hand it over myself, on the commissary floor, in front of everybody, and I say why.
Records has added a status column to this sheet. Records adds a status column to most things. Records has asked that it be read straight down without my commentary, and I have agreed, because I have read it straight down myself and there is no commentary I would add.
The Roll, 1958 – Spring 1959
Employee of the month, sixteen months, with present status per Records
| Month | Recipient | Department | Citation | Present status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 1958 | R. Kowalski | Machine shop | Built a thing on a Thursday that was asked for on a Friday | On the payroll |
| Feb 1958 | Greg | Reactor room | Cleaned the reactor room | On the payroll |
| Mar 1958 | E. Pike | Gate house | Columns agreed, thirty-one nights | On the payroll |
| Apr 1958 | M. Dubois | Materials | Extinguished bench four with his coat | On the payroll. Coat not. |
| May 1958 | L. Tremblay | Applied Sciences | Trial 58-006. See ASI-401. | File closed. No date. |
| Jun 1958 | Greg | Reactor room | Cleaned the reactor room | On the payroll |
| Jul 1958 | The steno pool | Third floor | Eleven at night, all of them, again | On the payroll. All of them. |
| Aug 1958 | — | — | — | No recipient. No explanation on file. |
| Sep 1958 | H. Lindqvist | Facilities | The fourth survey | Left without notice, October |
| Oct 1958 | Greg | Reactor room | Cleaned the reactor room | On the payroll |
| Nov 1958 | A. Ferreira | Substrate mill | Turned the President away at the mill door | On the payroll. Raised. |
| Dec 1958 | The commissary | Sub-Level 1 | The pie | On the payroll |
| Jan 1959 | J. Okafor | Operations | Chamber 8, eleventh of March, stayed at his post | On the payroll. Transferred at his request. |
| Feb 1959 | Greg | Reactor room | Cleaned the reactor room | On the payroll |
| Mar 1959 | — | — | — | No recipient. |
| Apr 1959 | Margaret, age 11 | Science fair | The potato | Still functioning |
Greg’s citation is the same every time because Greg’s work is the same every time and it is the only work in this building that has never once failed.
“Greg. Again. It is always going to be Greg some of the time, and the month it stops being Greg is the month we should all be worried.”
On Greg
Four times. Nobody else has had it twice. The Bulletin has printed three letters about it and the answer to all three is the same: Greg cleans the reactor room, the reactor room is the one room in this building that has to be clean and has to be clean every day, and in five years it has been clean every day, and that is a record no other person on this payroll can match.
He was down there before the reactor was. He has been asked to explain that and has not. Personnel has no start date for him and has stopped looking. He was reassigned once, to the mantid gallery, for a week, and was reassigned back, and neither Greg nor the mantids will say what happened, and both were fine.
Thirty-six photographs. Twenty-three still here. He knows the number. He said August was August and then he did not say anything for the rest of the afternoon. — C.
Form ASI-505. Citations are reprinted in the Aperture Bulletin. Twenty dollars is paid from the gate house tin under the same terms as Form ASI-306, which is to say in cash, the same day, whether or not the recipient is there to receive it.