Moutain Dew Containment Facility

Summer 1996. This one wasn't mine, but I was around when it happened. (Heck, I was the CEO of Turbine, the videogames company, so this must have took place under my supervision -- even if I only found out about it later.) I don't drink the stuff myself, but the programmers at Turbine seem to thrive on 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew. They affectionately refer to it as 'The Dew'. All-night hacking sessions go so much better with caffeine! (When we were choosing a company name, Jeremy joked that we should be "Sleepless Geeks Incorporated", but unfortunately SGI was already taken.)

We were saving the bottles for recycling, and eventually accumulated quite a few. But then the programmers got an idea. Let's build a raft! Moutain Dew bottles float. We'd build a huge raft and float across the Charles River. Maybe we'd get put into a Mountain Dew commercial or something. They called the expanding pile "The Moutain Dew Storage Facility and Containment Center", as a joke referring to nuclear waste centers. Mountain Dew really packs a punch!

This fuzzy picture is the only one I have This stack is 9 feet tall and two bottles deep.

We accumulated so many bottles that we couldn't store them. There were several hundred, far more than are shown in this photo. Once we used them to fill up somebody's cubicle as a birthday prank. Eventually, the containment center was doomed. Some of the bottles hadn't been washed well, and attracted flies. Dan O. volunteered to store them in the back of his truck, but after a month or two of non-action in terms of the raft concept, he dumped 'em. The raft was never built... at least, not yet!

The Mountain Dew Storage Facilty
and Containment Center: this stack
was two-deep and eight feet high.

Extra bottles that didn't fit.