Two Unexplained Incidents at a Machine-Building Plant

A few years ago I worked as a machine operator at a large machine-building enterprise. A former Soviet giant with several abandoned workshops and a huge territory behind a fence. Plus several more workshops had been demolished to nothing in the nineties, and so wind always blew across the territory, which, together with high-voltage power lines crossing the territory and the relative desolation against the backdrop of distant residential high-rises, created a rather cozy atmosphere, just like in the Lane experiments.
Let me say right away that I'm a mama's skeptic, I don't drink, don't smoke, don't use substances, don't suffer from hallucinations, and don't seem to have mental disorders. Nevertheless, it was at this very factory that I did encounter a couple of hard-to-explain things.

1) The so-called "shit-stomper". One winter, after the January holidays, footprints from dirty boots began appearing on the floor of one of the toilets. When I went in there, I thought that some hungover [slur] had probably missed the toilet and shit all over his legs. But the kicker was that, first, it didn't stink of shit (apparently it was brown clay). Second, the footprints smoothly appeared out of nowhere, not from the stalls, but right in the middle of the toilet section. Then they headed to the first sink, and from there to the exit of the toilet, and there they smoothly disappeared. Third, after the first discovery, the footprints began appearing once a day, at night before the day shift started. This shit-stomper always followed roughly the same route, and he did it on weekends too, so by Monday the cleaning ladies were greeted with a set of three trails of footprints. Of course, the cleaning ladies, seeing this outrage, went into rage mode and demanded that the foremen catch and punish the pig-prankster. But we had no cameras in the workshop, no one worked at night except a couple of duty locksmiths and electricians sleeping in the break rooms, so the culprit was never caught. Toward the end of winter the footprints stopped appearing. Someone could of course deliberately dirty their boots with clay, then put them on in the toilet, and take them off at the exit, but why?

2) "The hellish machine tool". Even when I first got hired at this factory, I noticed that for some reason no one worked at one machine (standing in a fairly prominent place). The machine itself was a standard 1K62 lathe, looking as if it had just come from the manufacturer, except covered in a thick layer of dust. So I asked an elderly Petrovich who had been working since Soviet times:
- There's a seemingly working machine, people work to its right and left, but not on it, why?
Petrovich explained that this machine was supposedly cursed. The machine itself was made in 1979, and it came to their workshop in the early '80s, when Petrovich himself was still a fresh vocational school graduate. This machine behaved like a rabid beast - with the main drive on, it would often spontaneously start spinning the spindle at random times (dangerous as hell, and the mechanics explained that it just had a sensitive start lever and needed to "warm up", except the warm-up could go on for a whole shift with no result), parts were constantly ruined on it - either taper would appear, or the dials lied shamelessly, or well-tightened jaws would suddenly loosen, or the runout was fucking insane both with and without centers, even though the jaws were bored to practically a hundredth and scrupulously checked with indicators. The gearbox got very hot, even though oil from the cooling system was gushing there so hard that it even lifted the cover. The lighting constantly burned out. Both mechanics and electricians took this machine apart almost to the last screw and reassembled it, and found no defects. The workers complained, but the management demanded they keep working on it, saying that a formally functional production unit cannot sit idle. In the end, this machine did maim one turner. It broke all the fingers on his left hand when he was tightening the jaws - the chuck spontaneously started rotating and pinned his palm to the guide with the key. Fortunately the RPMs were low and the guy managed to hit the stop button with his right hand. Management as always - it's not the machine that's shit, it's you who are clumsy fuckwits. They decided, in short, to put a mega-skilled grandpa-turner of the 666th grade, a local legend, a labor veteran, and also with his own quality stamp that he put everywhere the technology allowed, to show how one should work. Well, he was glad to show off his skills. They gave him a fairly simple task: make a set of small bushings. The technology for the uninitiated is as follows: cylindrical blanks are first turned on the ends to size, then drilled to a size a couple or three tenths of a millimeter less than nominal, and then finished with reamers. And of course small chamfers. The outer surface was not machined (otherwise this specialist would have had even more trouble with runout). He turned the ends without problems, but the drilling ran into trouble. His perfectly sharpened, specially shortened drills barely went into ordinary structural steel 20 (in our circles we call it plasticine). Moreover, the drills came out the other side with a hefty deviation from center. The old man was stunned, of course, took a blank and drilled it on his own machine - everything was great. He checked the alignment of the spindle and tailstock on the hellish one - all fine. In the end he got so tired of it that he drilled everything on his own machine, and decided to finish with reamers on the hellish one. He lubricated everything, inserted the reamer, seemed to go. He pulls it back out, measures, and the size went plus two hundredths (that's a lot and in an impossible direction, it should at least go minus) and the surface finish was shit of shit. The old man was stunned again, but still decided to change the reamer, maybe this one was just worn to hell. He took a fresh one from the warehouse and started working. Halfway through it broke, and broke in such a way that a small fragment from the holder flew into his forehead and left a scratch there. Even he realized then that things were bad. The management finally listened to his authority. The machine was de-energized and mothballed. Again, there seems to be no particular mysticism, but on the other hand...

Phew, I thought I'd write everything at once, but I got tired. I just reread it and realized it turned out to be pretty boring writing. Well, what can you do, I'm selling it as I bought it. I have two more stories from this factory, and in those I directly encountered something unclear. There's nothing mega-creepy there, rather things that cause bewilderment. I'll finish writing them during the week.