>>> [BBS THREAD: Green River: check your boots]
[THREAD STARTED BY: /Two_Wrench] 2075-03-18
/Two_Wrench
Retired, Local 130, thirty-one years on the river. Every March I watch my old crew do the pour, and every March I tell my grandson the orange powder is a family secret. It is. Nobody's ever written the recipe down.
Saturday the drums came off the truck with a sponsor's logo on them. EmeraldPure, the clear-water people. Union hands were told to pour "per the sponsor's spec," and the tug captains were given a wake speed. It came out greener than I've ever seen it. It also doesn't wash off. My grandson stood at the rail in his good sneakers. This morning they lit up under a cheap UV pen. So did the dog.
/Ledger
Corrections. The pour was Saturday the 16th at 1006, not Sunday. St. Patrick's Day was only the excuse. The sponsor's release calls the product "biodegradable and invisible to the naked eye." Half true: the dye breaks down, but the tag suspended in it doesn't. I've seen figures for its lifespan ranging from nine days to "permanent." Nobody who knows will say.
Also, I'm told the city took a "data partnership" fee. It was not called a bribe, because it was in the budget.
/RubyRose
MY BOOTS WERE RED now they're a color i can only describe as "swamp Christmas"
and i'm in the sponsor's highlights reel
/Ledger
0:41. You're in the second row, holding a beer, and you appear to be making a gesture at the camera.
/RubyRose
THAT WAS AFFECTIONATE, ALSO, PERV
/Abuela_Diesel
A client came into the shop Sunday with a pair of drones that had been parked near the river and a floor mat that was already glowing. By Monday my shop floor was too. It rubs off on tires, on soles, on anything that touches the ground twice. I'm not a saint, so I'm charging a decontamination fee.
Someone on Maxwell Street is selling "tracer wipes" out of a shopping cart. I bought a pack to test. It's hand sanitizer with a label. Don't buy it.
/Cubicle_9
Just asking questions. Monday morning the lobby readers at my building lit up like a slot machine. Every person who walked in got a little green dot on the security tablet. Someone from facilities said it looked like a constellation, and he meant it kindly. HR sent a memo saying "please do not remove footwear in common areas"
Is it legal to scan someone's shoes? Asking for a friend in logistics.
/Small_Talk
Finally, a river that matches its sponsors.
/Ledger
Legal status of scanning shoes: unresolved. Legal status of doing it after handing out the tag: an interesting question for a lawyer, none of whom I like.
/Ghost_Lake
Something people keep skipping: the river doesn't run to the lake anymore.
/Ledger
The flow was reversed in 1900. It's engineered, not backward. Continue.
/Ghost_Lake
Thank you for the history. My point is that whatever went into that water is traveling southwest through the canal, past Lockport, toward Joliet and eventually the Mississippi. A tag that needs a reader is only useful if someone is reading it. So who has readers in Lockport? Who's paying to know how many boots stood on a bridge in Chicago and then how far the water carried them?
/RubyRose
I HATE that i can't tell if this is a theory or a poem
/Ghost_Lake
Both.
/Two_Wrench
Update, and please don't repeat where you heard it.
Two drums were on the truck Friday, and one of them had no sponsor label, only an old supplier's stencil from before my time. Some of the boys took it and poured it the old way, at five in the morning before the sponsor's people arrived. Real orange, no tag. They did a stretch, maybe two blocks. Dennis says four, but Dennis was drunk and was standing on the wrong side of the bridge.
If you stood in the right place Saturday, your boots may be clean. If you stood in the wrong place, or the sponsor's team topped it up later, you're a dot.
/Ledger
Unverified. But I'll add it to the log.
/Abuela_Diesel
Now everybody in the Loop wants to know where the river was clean, and the men who did it won't say because they'd lose their pensions. Funny how the one decent thing done that day is the thing nobody can prove.