The Test Chambers
Every chamber in this company is a sentence, painted on the wall to the left of the door in enamel three inches high. Herewith the vocabulary, the grammar, and a walk through one chamber from the door you come in by to the door you go out by.
A test chamber is a room with a problem in it. You walk in one end, you understand the problem, you solve the problem with whatever the room has given you, and you walk out the other end. That is the whole of it. Everything else on this sheet is about how we tell you which problem it is, without a single word of English, from forty feet, through a plate-glass window, whilst the room is on fire.
We do not print the signs. We paint them. Visitors from the trade press keep asking whether a printed placard would not be cheaper. It would be. We tried it. Paper lasted eleven days in Chamber 3.
Paper burns. Paper takes up gel and goes grey and then goes away. Paper posted at a chamber entry has twice been carried off by a volunteer who took it for a souvenir, whereupon the grill took it from him at the door and the next man walked into a room with no instructions at all. Enamel survives a fire, a flood, a fling and the grill, and enamel can be changed at seven in the morning by a man with a brush.
The two men who do it came up from Marquette in 1952 to letter the foyer of Test Shaft 09 and have not run out of wall in the seven years since. They are the highest-paid tradesmen in this company and worth every dollar, and Accounting may read that sentence twice.
Signage — Standing Specification
- Medium
- Vitreous enamel on steel plate
- Plate
- 12 in. square; 18 in. for a hazard
- Ground
- White. Always white.
- Figure
- Black, 5-unit stroke, round terminals
- Second colour
- Orange, and orange means it will hurt you
- Position
- Eye height, left of the entry door
- Legibility
- Forty feet, through glass, in smoke
- Approved signs
- Twenty-two
- Signs with a meaning on file
- Twenty-one
The Grammar Of A Sign
A chamber sign is read left to right, in four fields, and each field answers one question in order: who, with what, does what, and then what. A field may be left blank. A field may not be moved. Two of the four fields are frequently the same pictogram and that is not an error in the painting; it is the chamber telling you something.
The signs read left to right in every shaft except Shaft 07, where they read right to left. Facilities holds that this was the second painter working back from the far end of the corridor in the winter of 1955 and losing his place. Operations holds a different view and has been asked not to publish it. Shaft 07 is not in service, so the question is academic.
The Approved Vocabulary
Corporate Identity Directive 12, Appendix B. The twenty-two approved chamber signs, of which fourteen are reproduced here and the remainder are on the wall.
| Sign | Name In The Directive | Reads As | In Service |
|---|---|---|---|
| SUBJECT | A man. You are the man. | 1952 | |
| APERTURE, PAIRED | Two holes, one interior. Go in the near one. | 1953 | |
| MOMENTUM, CONSERVED | Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out. | 1953 | |
| BUTTON, HELD | Press it. It does not stay pressed. That is the problem. | 1954 | |
| CUBE, WEIGHTED | Carry it. It is heavier than it looks and it looks heavy. | 1954 | |
| PLATE, AERIAL | You are going up. The landing is your affair. | 1955 | |
| GEL, LIVELY | The floor is not behaving as a floor. | 1955 | |
| DISCOURAGEMENT, THERMAL | Do not stand in the light. The light is not for standing in. | 1956 | |
| OBSERVATION | You are watched. Do not address the window. | 1952 | |
| GRILL, EMANCIPATION | You may not take that with you, whatever it is. | 1956 | |
| FIRE, EXPECTED | This fire is part of the test. There is no sign for the other kind. | 1957 | |
| INTERVAL | The figure beneath is in seconds and is not advisory. | 1956 | |
| WITHDRAWN 1957 | It was painted in eleven chambers before Legal came down and saw it. | — | |
| SIGN 22 | Meaning not on file. See the note below. | Not requisitioned |
Operations maintains the Directive. Operations has maintained it since 1952 and would like it recorded that twenty-one of the twenty-two entries were written by Operations.
On Sign 22
Sign 22 is painted at the head of the west corridor on the lowest working level of Shaft 09, on a plate of our steel, in our enamel, in the correct stroke and the correct hand. It was not requisitioned. It is not in the Directive. Neither painter will say he did it, and both are honest men who have never once denied a piece of work.
It shows a door, and behind the door a shape, and the shape is not one of ours. Personnel are to read it as a hazard sign and walk on, because a sign you cannot explain is still a sign, and what it is telling you is very probably not through here.
A Walk Through One Chamber, Door To Door
Take Chamber 4. It is not the most interesting chamber we have, and that is why I have chosen it: a man should learn the grammar on a plain sentence before he is asked to read a complicated one.
You come out of the lift into a corridor white to shoulder height, with a numeral and a sign every forty feet. At the entry door is the four-field plate of Figure 1. You read it in a second and a half; we have measured it on 4,118 men since 1954, and the mean is one and four tenths.
The door opens. The door seals behind you, and the plate to your right says so with one pictogram and no words. Every volunteer who ever complained of that plate complained afterwards rather than at the time, which Operations regards as proof the sign did its work.
Inside there is a button on a pedestal, a cube on the floor, and a door on the far wall that is open only whilst the button is pressed. The problem is stated by the room and by nothing else. The man behind the glass is not permitted to tell you the answer, is not permitted to nod, and has been instructed on the point twice in writing.
You will work out that the cube can press the button for you. Every man works this out. The fastest was forty-one seconds and he was a machinist from Escanaba and not an astronaut at all, which I mention because it annoys the lab boys and because it is true.
You go through the far door. The grill in the doorway takes from you anything you ought not to be carrying, which in Chamber 4 means the cube, a wristwatch, and on one occasion in 1957 a gentleman’s bridgework. Then the corridor, the next numeral, the next sign, and so the afternoon proceeds until three o’clock, when the last sign you read all day is the one with the elevator on it, and the one after that has a cake on it, and the commissary is on Sub-Level 1.
Before The Door Seals — Posted At Every Chamber Entry
- I have read the plate to the left of this door.
- I have read it left to right.
- I have counted the fields and there were four.
- I have not been told the answer by any member of staff.
- I understand that the orange field means it will hurt.
- I understand that a blank fourth field is not an oversight.
Chamber 8
Every visitor asks about the plate at Chamber 8, and every visitor is given a description rather than the thing, Operations having elected not to reproduce it in a document that leaves the building.
It is four fields wide, like the others. The first field is a man. The second field is a man. The third field is an arrow, and the arrow points back at the second field. The fourth field is not blank.
It was painted on the eleventh of March. The chamber was commissioned on the twelfth. Facilities has confirmed both dates in writing and offered no further remark, and I have decided, as President of this company, that a firm which can put a hole in one wall and take it out of another has no business being nervous about the order in which two things happened.
OPERATIONS FILE CARD, CHAMBER 8 — SIGNAGE:
Plate present. Correct to Directive 12 in medium, stroke and mounting. Not in Directive 12. Do not repaint. Do not photograph. Do not stand in the corridor reading it for longer than it takes to read it.
Interoffice Memorandum
Operations requisitioned eleven gallons of white and four of black for the quarter. Fourteen and five were drawn. This is the third quarter running in which more paint has left the shop than was ordered, and the discrepancy is consistent to a pint.
We are not suggesting theft. Nobody steals enamel. We are asking Facilities which wall it is going on, because it is going on a wall, and we should like that wall on the maintenance round like any other.
Whilst you are answering: the west corridor plate on the lowest working level is not ours and is not going to be painted over. That is settled. What remains is paperwork, which is what this memorandum is for.
The paint is drawn on my signature every quarter because somebody has to sign for it and he will not. He goes down at night with a brush and comes up with white on his cuff and tells me it is dust. I have stopped asking what he is painting. I have started counting the plates. — C.
Cave JohnsonPresident & FounderForm ASI-304, third printing. Approved for posting in every chamber of every working shaft.
Form ASI-304. The signage is instructional and does not warrant that the chamber will behave in the manner painted. See Form ASI-900 and the Rules of the Enrichment Center, rule four, which governs what a man is to do about a sign he does not understand.