What I Learned from the Campus Plumber

Gawking and awkward, we shuffled across the concrete floor between two huge metal tanks. One was a metallic blue, the other silver, and each connected to color-coded pipes that disappeared into the ceiling. We were in a room below the basement of the University Center. We had descended to the guts of the campus, and the tanks reminded me vaguely of two enormous, artificial kidneys. Ross Winters was waiting in the space between the tanks. Beneath his Fu Manchu mustache, he grinned with a self-conscious smile. Ross is the campus plumber, a trade he learned during his stint in the