Is the Academy’s Egg Room for real?
Inspiration
What kind of realities inspired the idea of calling a space at the Academy of Reality the ‘EggRoom’? In the mid twentieth century, there were all kinds of egg rooms with so-called egg graders that supposedly modernized chicken farms. A common brand name was ‘Egomatic.’ People often wondered if the spelling was intentional or accidental. Its inventor, Otto Niederer, an engineering genius, had no formal education and might have misspelled it himself.
Egg Room
After school in the sixties, I worked in an egg room, situated in the cellar of a chicken barn on an 1800s stone foundation, built so well that it didn’t require mortar to hold it together. (Later, in the nineties, the same post and beam building was converted into a farm store. According to the contractor’s transit, the 150-year-old foundation was still level and plumb.
No surrealistic flashing visuals, the stone foundation made the place dungeon-like. The grader sorted eggs by size and weight. The eggs were placed on a short track; they rolled down onto a bar that reciprocated to transfer eggs from right to left, to be weighed by a series of scales. If an egg is heavy enough to tip the scale, it rolls down into a tray where another worker boxes the eggs. If too light, the reciprocating bar moved it to the next tray, where another scale either released it or transferred it to the next tray. Eggs were sorted into four sizes: extra-large, large, medium, and small.
The job wasn’t anyone’s favorite. On the upside, the machine forced you to keep pace with the eggs transferred from the baskets to the machine, and another worker boxing them by size. You had to feed the machine eggs, keeping up with the motor that hummed along with the reciprocal bar and tipping scales. The only entertainment came from an old, beat-up tube radio that you had to slam with your fist to make the static disappear. Going modern, it was replaced with a small four-by-six-inch RCA transistor radio, its size considered an engineering miracle.
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Academy EGG ROOM Misspelled
A rumor suggested that the EGGroom spelling came from an over-booked sign painter’s careless spelling of EEG. The facilities people claimed that a spelling correction would be too costly to correct. The name didn’t matter much; sarcastic employees called it “Robotheatre,” a place that converts numerical reality into theatrical truth. No matter what people call it, it works well enough to cure Trivial Pursuit Disorder, a common condition that causes victims to focus on meaningless details. Possibly, Robotheatre might cure Attention Surplus, an affliction that makes victims pay too much attention to all things right or wrong.
Dystopian Nothingness
The Academy EggRoom is no joke; it’s a retreat. A conveyor serves repetitious eggs, visions of nothingness that somehow move still life. On his first visit, Sid watches: pigeon eggs on golf tees, forming a perfect line across an illuminated cathedral cubby. A hidden conveyor moves the eggs from right to left, an unusual direction for mechanized movement. Sid Sidney doesn’t try to be critical. In real life, at least in life more real than it is in the EggRoom, things usually move from left to right. One egg leaves; another arrives. Counting as they come and go makes a tiresome but better-than-nothing distraction. All white without marks or specks, the eggs are too uniform to count. There’s no way to pinpoint a beginning or end, no way to tell if those that pass ever return, no way to know if they recirculate repeatedly. Whatever it’s doing, the EEG must be measuring something important.
The eggs come and go, in and out of order, pausing momentarily, moving the other way, left to right, always a relief. A strobe light flashes, freezing movement. Eggs take on the ultra-bright shine of Madison Avenue toothpaste teeth.
The conveyor stops momentarily, then restarts. One egg has gone missing. No time for thinking, Sid’s thoughts move with the conveyor. Another egg goes missing. Or the empty tee passes twice as often.
E = mc2?