The McMurdo Rumor Mill

There are 944 people living on base.  The internet is painfully slow.  The magazines laying around the gym or in the galley are circa 2002, if you are lucky.  Heck, we live at the bottom of the world almost a day ahead of the rest of the USA... how are we suppose to know what is going on when we live in the future! Alas, not all hope is lost! The McMurdo Rumor Mill is thriving.  What your boss and HR won't share can easily be gleaned from the intricate galley chats and dorm room conversations.  Here are a few, from the far fetched folklore of days past to the current hullaballoo of McMurdo, well at least the non-X rated ones.  Note: None of my sources can be trusted:)

Winter Over Doctor: This is one of my all time favorites. A few years back, a Doctor unexpectedly had to leave the station just prior to the last flight departing the continent for winter.  HR was in a rush and hired a new doctor without giving the customary PQ (physically qualified) and psychological exams required of all winter-over employees.  MISTAKE! He wasn't quite cut out for the job.  At some point during the season he went a little off the deep end.  The galley staff reported him stealing large quantities of meat and it wasn't just a ham sandwich.  We are talking trays of bacon, which he stashed in his dorm room.  He then started doing research into the powers of static electricity.  Being the coldest and driest continent on earth, even here in the summer we are shocked by jumping blue sparks from the key to door handle.  This doc took it a bit too far and people soon found his plans to create a static electric powered spaceship on the community computer I: drive.  Not only was the bacon hoarded, but he started collecting any scrap metal and aluminum he could get his hands on for construction purposes.  Needless to say, he no longer was allowed to practice medicine on the Ice.  But since there are no planes from roughly the first week of March to the end of August, I imagine it was a long winter for all 100 people living on station.

Todd and Chris in the vinyl room. Yes Chris is wearing a wig:)  

Good Morning Vietnam: McMurdo is pretty awesome and has it's own radio station, ICE 104.5.  The base was built in 1956 and still has a room full of vinyl records from previous years.  Rumor has it that many of the records belonged to Adrian Cronauer, whom the movie "Good Morning Vietnam" is loosely based on.  Some say that after the Vietnam War, his records were transferred from that base to McMurdo.  Rumor or truth...who knows?

All Day Everyday:  Current word on the Ice is that there are 50,000 donuts on station.  Now that just seems excessive.

WWDD: Years back there was a Station Manager named Duffy who was evangelical in his preaching of morality and ethics.  The way he saw it, McMurdo was a den of sin at the bottom of the world.  In the bathrooms you can still find WWDD stickers on the paper towel dispensers.  Some people just don't change...

You're Being Watched: Some people like to say that McMurdo isn't a base for science at all.  The National Science Foundation, NASA, and university grantees are all a hoax.  McMurdo is just a huge psychological experiment for how people would survive on a station on Mars.  I'd like to think we'd fair pretty well.  But Mars doesn't have penguins. And I bet the internet would be even slower.

 So I Married An Ax-Handle Murderer: This is quintessential historical McMurdo folklore.  Woven over years and elaborated for all the new jacks like me so we get scared off and don't apply for the winter- over positions....the ax handle murder!  Rumor goes that a man became so insanely jealous over a friend dating his girl that he went crazy and broke into his room at night and beat him with an ax handle brutally murdering the guy in the middle of the dark Antarctic winter.  When I talked to Jim who was there that winter, I learned the truth.  It was a hammer handle.  And it was a murder where no one died... just a trip to the medical building.  Hopefully it wasn't the year with the crazy medical doctor, he probably would be bandaged up with bacon and sent into space using a pair of socks on carpet!