Happy Opening Day 2019!

In honor of baseball season starting, I thought that I would once again attempt to post daily leading up to the Reading Fightin Phils home opener. I know it has been some time since my last post, so I am hoping this will get me back into the habit of writing regularly.

Since the Fightin Phils’ home opener is April 12 this year, that would make it 15 days away from today. This will also be my 15th season with the organization. Judging from the title of this post, I am sure you can see where this is going. I thought it would be fun to share 15 memories from my 15 seasons for the 15 days leading up to Opening Night. I will share a different story each day and they will be shared in no certain order. It will be hard enough to pick only 15, let alone putting them in order of importance. In the midst of enjoying the return of baseball season, please enjoy some of my favorite memories from my experiences in the sport!

I feel the need to preface this first memory by saying that when I worked in the left field deck stand, we got away with more than we should have in terms of things that went on inside the stand. We always did what we were supposed to, but we may have taken some things a bit too far.  Just keep this in mind for the following story and future posts that will appear on this page. Anyway, here is the story about how there came to be a ceiling fan in the Longstrike Deck Stand.

15. DIY Ceiling Fan

It was the middle of the summer and we had reached the point where it was still very hot and humid at night during games. As with any outdoor concession stand, the only means of “air conditioning” that the stand had were the open door and the two large windows where everything took place. We also had a large floor fan that we would stand just inside the door in the hopes that it would pull in some cooler air. In a stand that housed two standing fryers and a countertop fryer along with two rolling grills, this did not provide much relief on a hot night. Being the mature group of high school teenagers that we were, we decided one evening that this was not sufficient enough and we needed to find a way to cool off the stand more. This is where things got a little out of hand.

We decided to see if there was a way we could suspend the floor fan from the beams of the ceiling because in our minds that would make a big difference. Now, this fan had already been knocked over more times than we could count and it had definitely seen better days. I will say that before deciding to attach it to the ceiling, we did attempt to place it on top of a freezer and on a rolling cart, both of which did not work out so well. Why we thought hanging it from the ceiling was a better idea, I will never understand.

That being said, we began to look for a way to hang the fan from the ceiling. After an in-depth search around the stand for hanging material, we settled on a spare microphone cord that was stored in the corner of the stand. The cord was there in case the microphone used for the Highstrike game set up outside the stand stopped working and needed to be plugged in. Seeing as it had never been needed before, we decided we could use it to hang our fan from the rafters. While it was an innovative idea, we were not thinking about all the ways this could turn into a potential disaster.

After we settled on using the mic cord as our hanging material, things got interesting. We managed to hook the cord through the top of the fan and then threw the ends of the cord over the rafter of the ceiling, resulting in a floor fan that was indeed hanging from the ceiling. Here is where the plan went wrong.

The only place that we had an open outlet to plug in the fan was right inside the door. As a result, the fan ended up hanging right inside the door. Since the fan was built to sit on the floor and not to hang, it was a decent size and weighed a decent amount so we were not able to hang it very high off the floor. It hung about chest high on an average height person. We were very proud of  the fact that we had managed to pull off what we thought was a brilliant plan, and were congratulating ourselves when the assistant concessions director decided to walk through the door, nearly decapitating himself on the fan that he did not realize was there. As a result, he bumped the fan which caused the entire contraption to fall to the floor.

After that, we not only had no ceiling fan, we also no longer had a floor fan.

Surprisingly, not one person ended up getting in trouble. We were told to never attempt something like that again, but since no one was hurt and we didn’t break anything except the fan, the rest of the night continued as normal. In the end we left that night feeling proud of our short-lived victory. We did not expect that feeling of pride to carry into the following night. Imagine our surprise when we walked in the next night and found a brand new ceiling fan installed in the stand – no mic cords needed.

That ladies and gentlemen, is the story of how there came to be a ceiling fan in the Longstrike Deck Stand.

Confessional: What is one of the craziest things you or a coworker have done at work that you did not get in trouble for?