Would it be appropriate to ask about your co-workers?
I have been sitting on this one for a WHILE, taking my time to get everything together because I think this is a really good "excuse" to expand the scope of things a bit. Plus I wanted to make sure I got as much of this from the proverbial horse's mouth as possible. Gave me an excuse to really get to know my co-workers and make myself neighborly. So I'm going to profile the people that I work with the closest down below the best I can. The only problem is I'm not super comfortable pasting photos of these people all over the internet so we're all going to have to deal with my art and pretend its not a crime against the visual medium ok? Ok.
Also I saved this for my birthday (5/1/25 barring some sort of unforeseen catastrophe) as a gift to myself since I was excited to write and a gift to your Krins for being my best customer ;P
(I know, I KNOW. Let's just ignore my art and move along shall we)
Ahmed Gustseriev - Security.
Gender: Male
Place of Birth: Nazran, Ingushetia, Russia (Former USSR)
Nicknames: The Fridge Favorite Superhero: Red Star
This one might end up being the shortest because I already did a whole post on Ahmed not too long ago! But as you can see from my..."rendering" he really is trying to connect with his Muslim roots after retiring from his near lifelong role as a Rocket Red as seen by his full beard and traditional papakha head covering! I really cannot do justice to how much LIFE is evident on this man's face when you're looking at him. Just by looking him in the eye you notice a dozen wrinkles and scars that tell you he has been put through the meat grinder more than once and the only thing that happened is the grinder got shredded in his wake. We call him "The Fridge" because he stops people cold just by looking at them and because he is LITERALLY wider at the shoulder than our office fridge. Whenever any of us are having a problem with an attendee we don't even have to call him over before he's pushing his shadow down on top of the trouble maker like it weighs a ton. I have never, EVER seen an instigator argue with him. I can only recall a handful of times he's had to actually speak to someone he was escorting out of the building. Before I go too far into making him seem like an unapproachable badass, he really does make me feel as safe as possible at all times. He's the reason I can always stand my ground face to face to police, to conspiracy theorists, he's always backing us up and he's proud to do it. Also he really likes tea. ALSO ALSO he has asked me to say that he has four cats, he says anyone familiar with Muslims will not be surprised by this. Bless 'im.
Mandy McManus-Washington - Engineering
Gender: Female
Place of Birth: Fawcett City, Pennsylvania, USA
Nicknames: Mandy Marvel Favorite Superhero: Mary Marvel
Is there a problem needs solving? A bench unlevel? A drinking fountain on the fritz? Is an electronic making a really annoying noise on your rounds? Is your life just plain a little bit too boring today? Get on that walkie talkie and call up Mandy Marvel! Does anyone remember the multiple times I have spoken about the intense and almost disproportionate pride that people from Fawcett City happen to have for their community? Mandy is why, even if she is on the far northern extreme of Fawcett pride her existence is demonstrative. She has a lightning bolt band "necklace" tattoo along her collarbone with matching versions on both wrists and ankles and a bullet tattooed in flight on both shoulders and thighs just in case we were ever worried she forgot Fawcett's original #1 heroes. She has black fingernails, piercings in her nose, tongue and three in her ears, I have never once seen her without a pair of fingerless gloves and a pair of grey overalls that may or may not be surgically attached to her. She seems to subsist on photosynthesis, Monster Energy and making every piece of machinery in her line of sight sit up, shut up and say uncle. She will never be satisfied with her day if she doesn't exit the building with a few extra centimeters of soot DIFFERENCE from the few centimeters of soot she walked IN with. She's a wild energizer to be around, my job will never be boring while she and I work in the same place and she's just so friendly. She always wants to talk, wants to joke, wants to share and she just brings a buzz to any conversation no matter how mundane.
Gwen - Occult Consultant
Gender: Genuinely No Idea
Place of Birth: Ditto
Nicknames: I Don't Even Know if GWEN is a Nickname Favorite Superhero: Rose Psychic
This one is slightly cheating because Gwen doesn't actually work here at the Perisphere. No, I know Gwen because of this blog. When I started to get questions of a magical nature which is far, FAR beyond my area of education I started tugging on some threads to see if I could find a guiding hand so I didn't make a fool of myself. Gwen so graciously offered their services after we met up at a little coffee shop I cannot remember the name of and that does not seem to exist at the address that I went to. Strange.
Other than that Gwen's great! Any time of day or night if I happen to have a question of the arcane variety I can shoot it off to them and start talking through it. These conversations started to drift over time and it turns out we're into a lot of the same anime and the like and ever since then we've been hanging out outside of work. We've been trying to complete one escape room a week and its been a blast. You make friends in the strangest spaces I suppose.
I don't know much about Gwen, like the bio up above implies. I don't pry and the surface details aren't as obvious as some people would like to think. They have thick glasses, a dark coat and a mohawk. They're also missing the first joint of the pinkie on their right hand. Oh AND their favorite My Hero character is Kyoka. Gwen you can't get mad at me for saying that when you have THREE Kyoka key chains attached to your wallet!
Rodney "Rod" Rosenwein - Youth Tour Guide
Gender: Male
Place of Birth: Brooklyn, New York, USA Nicknames: שְׁרִיר/Shemrir, Hebrew for Muscle Favorite Superhero: Seraph
Finally we get to the guy I work with closest in any given work day. Where as I am the tour guide for our full, multi hour, beat by beat tour. Rod is the guy in charge of giving our abridged tours and, most importantly, is the person put in charge of school trips or other large gatherings where there are expected to be children present. He does this with jaw dropping aplomb, oftentimes I will hear him crack a joke from all the way across the hall and I almost half the swallow my tongue to keep from losing my shit in front of my much more serious/much less fun tour groups. Rod is from Brooklyn, making him the only native New Yorker among us. He's Jewish as evidenced by the bright silver Star of David that he always wears hanging down in front of his t shirt. He has a MONSTROUS head of black hair that usually cover his dark brown eyes. He also has an outside hobby of BODYBUILDING which is something he can always find some way to show off, especially because the casual nature of his tours puts him in a lot more t-shirts and khakis compared to my collared shirt and slacks.
If I had to define him by one thing it would be a kind of...sardonic kindness. He is always making sarcastic quips to see the reactions of the people around him but its impossible for it to escalate because of the smile that always accompanies his jokes. He's, for instance, the only one who can make Ahmed crack a smile on a regular basis. He's always encouraging to his coworkers and to the students who are placed under his supervision. I have never seen someone who can so easily inspire kids of any age to look at our defenders in a new light. Even if his puns are terrible enough to make me want to throw things sometimes. These are just general overviews but that's the fun part, this is them giving me permission to open the floodgates so to speak. If you folks have questions that you think might better be answered by one of them, want to know more about them, or just want to see what they'd say, that's an option that we have now. Happy Birthday to me! And here's to the greatest job in the world!
