Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [49]
My next course was a technical course, the Audio Basics Course. No Scientology stuff I thought – wow. This would be the first thing I would study that was not filled with LRH issues from 20 years ago. I opened the course pack. The first issue was Keeping Scientology Working #1. Okay, well that issue was in the front of every course in Scientology. I came to the first nontechnical issue; it was written by Hubbard in the 1980s and was all about nano webers and magnetic flux and how these all make audiotape possible. There was no escaping it. Hubbard had something to say about everything and no matter what, I would have to study it if I was to get through these courses.
It took me only a few days to plow through this last course. As soon as I was done, I went on my first post.
Chapter Nine – My Secret Garden
I was told where to go and that I would meet a girl named Clarisse. I arrived in Building 36 in what they called the Gauss line. Clarisse was a short girl in her 30s and wore a long sad puppy dog look most of the time. She gave me the tour of the whole cassette production facility. The Gauss line was the high-speed cassette manufacturing facility at Golden Era Productions. They had two giant master machines, both of which would load master production reels that would play back on a huge loop. The signals from the master machines were transferred to 16 high speed copying “slave” machines that had huge reels of cassette tape on them called “pancakes.” Both the master and playback machines ran the tape through at 32X normal speed. In 30 minutes you could make 30 cassettes on each machine. With 16 machines, depending on the length of the lecture being copied, you could crank out 400-500 tapes every hour including setting up and reloading the machines with new tape.
The huge reels were then checked by a special Studer brand tape machine that was designed to play them.
The pancakes were loaded into cassette shells that were then labeled, stuffed into binders, shrink-wrapped, boxed up and shipped out. As we entered the packaging area, there were stacks and stacks of cassettes everywhere. There must have been a few hundred thousand tapes, easily. They were in red plastic bins piled high throughout the entire room. None were in binders, just loose cassettes piled into big plastic bins.
After Clarisse showed me the production facility, I could not help but notice that the place looked like a ghost town. Everywhere else I had been on the property there were people working and desks with baskets filled with papers and trash cans with trash in them. This place had nothing. No papers on any desks, no people working in it, no duffle bags under the desks with the occasional pair of shoes sitting around, nothing. It was as sterile as could be.
Clarisse, or “CB” as she stated she preferred to be called, said that she was the only person posted here and that I would be taking the job as the Tapes Packaging In Charge. More people would be coming to take over the other ten posts that were empty.
Okay. Weird but okay.
When I got to dinner, I told Tom that I was being posted in Tapes Manufacturing. He said he knew that. He told me that all the people coming up to Gold from the mission down in LA would be posted there.
“That is why there was a mission to get a bunch of people up here from LA,” Tom said, “to man up tapes with NEW personnel.”
“Where did all of the people that worked there before go?” I asked.
“Either declared or sent to the Rehabilitation Project Force,” Tom said matter of factly while eating his last bite of dinner.
“What?” I asked him as we got up and headed towards the bussing station, “How?”
“Well, they made about 300,000 overt product cassette tapes,” Tom said, “And a lot more that probably went out to public that we never found.”
“Holy crap!” I freaked. “How many people are we talking about?”
“Oh, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine. CB is still over there though, right?” We finished bussing our dishes and headed out for a smoke.