Speaker 1: Fast Food Horror is an abbey normal production.
Speaker 2: Welcome listeners to Fast Food Horror. In this episode entitled
The Shaft, a poor cold soul is in search shelter,
but he has found something quite different.
Speaker 1: Is there anything better than getting paid for doing absolutely nothing?
I don't mean that you are actively avoiding work, Nor
do I mean you're engaged in some mundane task that
requires no thought, or being assigned to guard an empty
parking lot or an abandoned building. I mean being tasked
to do us something that requires positively absolutely nothing. That
is what you are expected to do nothing. Currently, I
am engaged in such work to do nothing. It is
the benefit of my position. I am a trainer for
great expectations tours a bus company here in Buffalo. I
train new bus drivers to attain their commercial driver's licenses.
That is not the non work position. The non work
comes at the end of the driver's training. On the
day of the road test. I am testd with escorting
them to the road test in a company bus to
the Niagara Falls test location. Then, because I cannot be
on board the bus during the test to wait for
them to complete it, it could be done in five minutes.
It could take the entire hour and a half, and
or it could be longer, depending on traffic or the
tester's commitment to thoroughness for the driving portion. It all
depends on how successful they are in completing each stage
of the road test. Fall a stage and the test
is over.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Most days it's not that bad. When the sun is shining.
You can sit back and doom, scroll on your phone,
or bring a book and get some serious chapters in.
But on winter days like this, with the mist from
Niagara Falls being carried by the chili winds and covering
everything in its cold, damp kiss, it can be miserable.
The location is right along the river, in the old
factory section of the falls. There is very little in
the way of wind block and nowhere to walk to
reasonably close to sit and wait in some warmth. You
are simply left to sit and wait and pray you
wore enough layers. I figured the best way to stay
warm was to stay in motion, so I began to
pace the perimeter of the large parking lot. But after
fifteen minutes my face already started to feel the bitter
bite of the wind. After twenty five minutes, I was
already damp with mist, and after thirty minutes I was
regretting even coming in. Today, I started my fourth lap
of the lot and started to wonder if the abandoned
rust bucket of a storage container in the back corner
would offer any semblance of a wind block. On approach,
I could hear the wind whistling through its many holes,
and knew even before I made my way around its
corner that I had not found salvation. My clothing being
damp all the way through, was also not helping. I
was cold, freezing, and was only thirty minutes in. I
still had to make it perhaps another hour. My back
against the container wall, I noticed there was a brush
line to the right, and just beyond the brush line,
hidden by their branches and leaves, a row of concrete
jersey barriers, the kind they put in the middle of
the highway. There was just four of them. If the
ground was dry on the other side, I could sit
behind those and at least keep warm out of the
wind's chilly embrace. I walked over, my arms clutched around myself,
and found that not only was there a line of them,
but there was more of them forming a square, and
in the middle of the square a four by four
foot shaft leading down, with a ladder attached on the
far side of the shaft stone wall. I didn't know
how I'd never noticed this, perhaps because most times when
I've been up here, the sun was shining and I
remained in the middle of the parking lot, never traveling
anywhere else, never exploring the perimeter. I wondered how this
wasn't covered by a manhole cover or a metal plate
of some sort. Clearly this was a safety issue, but
my mind started spinning. The wheels started turning. Where did
the ladder lead? I knew this parcel of land had
been abandoned for some time, at least as far as
I could remember of my forty nine years. The brush
clearly hid the shaft. I stepped up on one of
the jersey barriers, now only about five feet from the hole,
and I tried to gain a better perspective. The ladder
seemed to just keep going down. I took out my
phone and extended it out over my body and took
a picture, then brought the phone back up to my
face to see what I had captured. I could see
about twenty rungs before all that was left to see
was darkness. If I'm being honest, I'm on the heavier side,
about five ten and pushing the scale well over two
hundred thirty pounds. The ladder looked well worn. I'm not
sure I trusted its stability, but my curiosity went over.
I stepped down off the jersey barrier and walked up
to the hole. I lowered myself onto my stomach and
extended my phone over the opening of the shaft with
a flashlight on. The ladder was definitely old. It was
well constructed, though, and did not look as fragile as
I once thought. I then looked straight down to the hole,
into the darkness, extending my arm into it as far
as I could, trying to see how far it went down.
I lost count of the metal rungs and could not
see the bottom. I wasn't yet willing to travel down
the ladder to test its structural integrity, but my curiosity
was not yet satisfied. What was down there and how
far did it extend? What was its purpose? I got
to my feet. I needed some way to explore the
shaft without going into the shaft. If only I had
something to lwer my phone into the shaft, securely, I
sprung to my feet and walked back to the storage container.
Perhaps there was something within. I opened the door, and
its ancient hinges creaked as it opened wide. Various hand
tools were inside, shovels, spades, brooms, pickaxes and such. Multiple
stacks of orange cones lying in one corner. A workbench
was attached to the inside of the container. Hammers, nails,
screwdrivers and screws, none of which would be useful. But
then I found it exactly what I was hoping to
find in a container of tools, a spool of twine.
I snatched it up, and as I walked out of
the container, began tying my phone to one end. I
slipped over the jersey barrier and onto my stomach yet again,
and extended my torso.
Speaker 2: Over the hole.
Speaker 1: I hit record on my phone with a flashlight on
and began lwering it slowly down the shaft into the darkness.
Further and further. I watched the light descend into the
inky darkness, and then the darkness was all I could
see and remember. And then as
Speaker 2: Todd