Not to Burst Your Boiler: An Interview with Fordham's Disgraced Boiler

By Charlie Friedlander

IN A TRAGIC TURN OF EVENTS, Fordham Lincoln Center’s once revered boiler has fallen victim to the slow, inevitable march of time, leaving Lowenstein without heat for a number of days. Though gossip and rumors have spread throughout the campus, the boiler is finally ready to speak up for itself. Naturally, the diligent reporters of The Bleat were the first on the scene to conduct an interview.

INTERVIEWER: Okay, we’re on the record. My name is Charlie Friedlander, and I’m here with-

BOILER: Hi. I’m the boiler, you can just call me Bo for short.

INT: Bo, great. Great to have you here. To start off, can you tell us a little bit about your job at Lincoln Center?
BO: I make the buildings warm.

INT: Right, could you go a little more in depth with that?

BO: Well, I started out here a couple decades ago. I’ve been heating up Lowenstein longer than I can remember to be honest. I make the heat, then I pipe it through the building so that the classrooms are warm. You’re welcome, by the way.

INT: That’s a pretty lengthy tenure. What’s it like to boil the water that heats up Lowenstein?

BO: Well -- I just wanna put this to rest -- there’s been a lot of talk about us boiling water; that’s not our job. You wanna boil something, get a kettle. Creating steam? Now that’s real work. I actually majored in steam development at a much better school. I won’t name it. Ah, what the hell -- it’s NYU. 

INT: So take us through a day in the life of a big-league boiler

BO: It’s a lot of work. Being a verifiable vapor-makin’ boiler isn’t like being a filthy furnace, those goddamn hacks. And don’t get me started on these maintenance guys -- they leave the door open all the time, and to be honest they’re pretty handsy with me.

INT: So it’s a hard job?

BO: No, I burst because I got too many days off -- what do you think? Every day, I got you guys breathin’ down my proverbial neck. Always ‘make this hotter’,  ‘make this colder’, ‘it’s not room temperature in here’ -- what the hell is room temperature? I’m the friggin’ boiler and I got no clue. The pressure is really high -- that’s a boiler joke. 

INT: Bo, do you think you can tell us a little about the day in question?

BO: Sure. I was heatin’ up Lowenstein -- y’know, my regular gig -- but I started getting flooded with demands all of a sudden.

INT: What kinds of demands?

BO: Y’know, the normal kind. ‘Make it hotter, make it colder’, that stuff -- you frickin’ snowflakes are like Goldilocks with the thermostat.

INT: What happened next?

BO: Well my technician had been telling me I had to take it easy, or I was gonna blow a gasket. So I’m heatin’ this up, coolin’ this down, stressing a bunch, and then it happened -- popped a valve clean off.

INT: I’m sorry to hear that, Bo. Once the valve was off, you couldn’t heat the building anymore?

BO: That’s right. I was freakin’ out. This is a good gig, but we’re not unionized here -- anything that happens to me on the job, I gotta pay out the pipes.

INT: Sorry Bo, just to be clear -- you don’t receive any benefits from Fordham?

BO: Nope. Nada. Zilch. Not even a pension once we’re done. I had a buddy -- he was the entire sixth floor of Lowenstein -- a couple years ago, the admins said they wanted to ‘rejuvenate the school’. They got rid of him for some new shiny computer labs and some stupid cubicle things. I hear they’re doing it to a bunch of other floors of Lowenstein too.

INT: Wow. What about you? Will you be able to go back to work?

BO: No. They’re replacing me with some new hothead. Decades of diligent service for these Catholics-

INT: Woah Bo, let’s watch the tone there-

BO: [inaudible] - a God-fearing Protestant boiler-

INT: Alright Bo let’s get back on track. Are there other heating opportunities out there? It’s the middle of winter, people must be looking for boilers-

BO: Heating opportunities? You think there’s a LinkedIn for boilers? I’m too worn out to job search now, and nobody wants a boiler that could burst at any minute. Thank god my wife is still employed; she’s the fire safety alert system in McKeon.

INT: I imagine that she was pretty alarmed when she heard the news about you.

BO: That’s not funny.

[silence]

INT: Alright Bo, thank you very much for your time.
​
BO: Yeah. Whatever.

You can donate to Bo’s GoFundMe page, to help support him in his retirement.