Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [93]
While these rigs seemed fine for a small shoot to pump some people up and get them to dump more money down for the Super Power building, I myself could not fathom how they would be perfecting these to install in a building for regular and constant use by paying public. Just think about how often roller coasters break down and people get hurt. Now just pretend that Billy Bob down the street designed and built the roller coaster. That was what these rigs were. They were home grown projects that had a lot of money behind them.
After we had set up the rigs and shot the footage, Dave Miscavige thought he would show off all the work his CST people had done and started bringing more and more perceptics rigs to the base for people to see and try out. He actually had many of these set up in his newly built 70 million-dollar RTC “Building 50”. Funnily enough, the 70 million dollar RTC building went from design to built in no more than five years. That included the interior work being redone several times and having a lot of very expensive furniture custom built, but still it got done in one fourth of the time as the Super Power building! Once the perceptics were set up, Dave showed us these himself and compared them to what was done before over the past twenty years.
There was the Smell perceptic. Hundreds and hundreds of vials of distinct smells that did not evaporate. You name it, bananas, peppermint, sunflowers, any smell that you can think of, they had it in a vial. There were rows and rows of vials and each one had a number on it. Some of the smells were very similar, like oranges, tangerines, orange peel, orange juice, you had to tell the difference and until you could name each and every one correctly, you did not finish this perceptic.
Dave Miscavige said that before CST had made and designed the perceptic devices, the smell perceptic was done using plates of oranges, apples, lemons and bananas. You could have done the old smell perceptic with a hotel breakfast cart! So that is how the Feshbachs got through the smell perceptic.
We saw a rig for drilling the balance perceptic. It was a small diamond plate platform about 3 feet wide that had a small handle bar that came up from the floor and had three places where you could grab with your hand. You would stand on the platform and it would slightly adjust its pitch randomly to try and get you to fall off. If you grabbed the handles it would shut off and default the platform back to its flat position. Ray Mithoff got on the machine and Russ Bellin turned it on. Before it could even really start to change its pitch, Ray lost his balance and grabbed the handles. Even I lasted around 15 seconds before grabbing the handle on my first go!
While we thought this “show and tell” was very interesting, Dave Miscavige had another reason for showing us all this stuff.
One morning shortly thereafter, he called us all into the main conference room in Building 50. We all knew that this would be one of those six-hour meetings where he would tell us why we were all responsible for keeping this project stalled. He explained that CST had spent many years and many millions of dollars perfecting the perceptic devices for the new Super Power building. Even with that he did not think that would get us any closer to opening the new building. Why?
START OF MEETING: The Super Power building had been redesigned and partially built, but was having to be redesigned again to properly fit the new perceptics rigs and even that was a guess as none of the rundowns had been delivered with these devices, they had just been worked out on paper. They had not been tested or piloted with people and auditing. Dave reminded us that the new designs also meant that all the money that the Landlord office spent on the original “Death Star” Super Power Building design had to be scrapped and the new design would match the Fort Harrison more. That was millions of dollars wasted on the old plans, designs, models, etc.
Now here was the real