Christian Mayer

“I went to work on the construction of the Intelligence Bridge, where I told them that I was a carpenter and they thus hired me as a carpenter, but then did a different job… After about a month, I started doing underwater work in caissons. We were building the four caissons that are in the foundations of the Intelligence Bridge. The deepest one under Barrandov is interesting, it is built in the depth of thirty metres. The pressure down there is three atmospheres, and the work shifts were arranged accordingly. Our salary was a bit higher than the top manager’s salary, and we were being paid very well, but there were other guys who could not stand this kind of work for too long and they left. The work then finished and I continued doing underwater work in caissons in the Lipno water reservoir for some time.”

“I went there one time before, right before the currency reform, the first one, and doctor Votava went there with us. We called him Pixie. He was a former Boy Scout, too, and he was a doctor and he served as a coroner who examined the corpses when somebody drowned. We jokingly called him ‘corpse-eater.’ He bought all the alcohol they had from some pub in Týn nad Vltavou, and he buried the bottles on Sejcký Island. When we went there about a year later, the water level rose so much that the island was half-submerged in water, and the trees that had been there had been cut down. He was running all over the island with a hoe, trying to find some of the bottles. He eventually found one, but he broke it with the hoe. We thus drank the contents on the spot and that was the end of it. The investment of his money into alcohol really has not worked well for him.”