BOFH: Switch off the building? Great idea, Boss BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "How much power does the company use in a day do you think?" the Boss asks. "Oh, it's hard to say, but we could look at the check meters in the MCB room. They have pulse indicators so we could count the pulses and make a 10 minute average." "And we could use that to work out how much …
LOL - this story reminds me of my job, fixing early Holter monitors in the 70's, we used aerosol cans of solvent to clean some of the parts and the guy training me asked me to read the can, I read that it said "the solvent is non-inflammable" so he picked up the can, held up a cigarette lighter and hit the button.
A flame shot about 8 feet across the room - the solvent was non-inflammable, but the propellant wasn't!
Inflammable is a confusing word, which is why it isn't used any more. I worked with someone who thought it meant non-flammable. Up til the day he tried to put out a small fire with something that was mainly isopropanol...
His punishment was to get all the customer site callouts until his eyebrows grew back.
> Liquid Oxygen, non-flammable = technically true
Note true. Fluorine can oxidise oxygen.
Messing with oxygen-fluorine compounds needs to be left to experts who have suicidal tendencies (such compounds tend to be explosively hypergolic with almost anything else).
(My coat... the one with "Ignition!" in the pocket.)
I lost too many hours to reading that blog.
The nastiest thing I ever worked with was diazomethane as a high-yield methylation agent, and that was quite nasty enough (acutely toxic, as well as carcinogenic and teratogenic, and a contact explosive is it ever comes out of solution or gets too warm). Reactions were done cautiously, in an ice bath behind a blast shield in a well running fume hood, and only in glassware with smooth joints (no sintered glass!), and if you ever smelt the solvent (ether, which is quite easily recognisable), you'd hit the emergency vent button and scram. Thankfully I never did. I'm glad I no work in a field where if I make a stupid mistake I run the risk of blowing myself up, or condemning myself to a slow death through chronic poisoning.
> Just to be a pedant, don't you mean that it could Fluoridate oxygen?
No. The reaction is a oxidation-reduction reaction. The oxidiser is reduced while the other reactants are oxidised.
Multiple elements, generally on the upper right hand side of the periodic table (but not the noble gases) can act as oxidisers; chlorine is a common example.
When I was at school, "oxidation" was defined as "loss of electrons" in a chemical reaction. Oxygen famously causes that, but what's left is the same whether the oxidiser is oxygen or something else, and fluorine can cause oxidation of oxygen. Of course, that happens when they have nothing else to react with, and it is quickly and I expect noisily undone when there is something else.
OILRIG: Oxidation Is loss, Reduction Is Gain (of electrons).
Ironically, on the grand scale, a lightning strike is actually the loss of electrons (The electron stream moves up the lightning bolt), but the result is your reduction to a pile of ashes...
I think you mean menthylate. If you managed to methylate your lungs, you'd be in serious trouble. See my post about diazomethane above, as this is exactly the risk you are doing your level best to negate when handling this stuff. That, and being blown up.
Fluorine sits there in the top right of the periodic table, snarling at the other elements, like a bobcat backed into a corner.
Most of its compounds are nasty stuff, such as HF, the only acid that has to be kept in a plastic bottle, because it dissolves glass.
Inflammable is confusing because people are no longer taught either Latin or about prefixes. What do you say when a scratch or similar goes all red and nasty looking? it has become inflamed (not "flamed"). This is because there are two different meanings for the prefix in-. One has the negative connotations e.g. insensitive, infallible and is probably more common. The other has a variety of meanings such as "in" or "into" or expressing intensity (see what I did there?).
"They needed it to put out they newly invented fire..."
I was visiting a pal who lived in a little cottage out in the sticks. He had cranked his coal burning stove up to 11 (For those stove porn dudes it was a Doric) but had forgotten a pan of oil in the oven. While we were sitting and drinking coffee I kept seeing an orange flash from the gap around the oven door. The oil was igniting, using all the oxygen and then repeating the cycle. When he opened the oven door it went thermonuclear so he quickly shut it. So my pal being a genius decided that dirt would put out the fire and went outside and got some. We had a plan, I would open the door and he would throw his dirt onto the fire. It did not work :(
Then I remembered that I had a Halon fire extinguisher in my car (this was a long time ago). I opened the oven door and gave it a half second squirt. Success, the fire went out! Bear in mind that we were both kneeling in front of the stove. We looked up to see that the entire room from the ceiling down was now half filled with a layer of white and most likely toxic fumes. We crawled of the house on our knees.
I have no idea how I've managed to live so long :)
Tremendous!
Not as good as yours but many years ago in the early / mid 80s (I'd be about 7 or 8 I think) my dad's mate was a mechanic and often took on extra work cash in hand, and he had a canny garage with all sorts of fascinating tools and equipment that we were never allowed to touch or play with.
I remember coming home from school one day to discover he'd had a fire when welding (knowing what I know now, I appreciate most cars then simply dissolved in the wet) and he'd put it out using an extinguisher he'd got. A blue one.
I don't know how big this fire was but it would probably have been preferable to simply let the house become engulfed with flames that attempt to clear the mess of all that powder. Crikey what a mess. It had got into the kitchen, the lounge and everything had a thick layer of dust over it
A long long time ago we were working on my mum's MK1 escort estate using the oxy acetylene which my parents were dubios about having under the house in the garage.
Lo the car set on fire and we used the powder fire extinguisher to put it out. Took about a milli second burst to put it out but it went for ages, everything was covered, car, garage, drive, flower beds.
So we spent the next hour or so before they came home frantically cleaning up and learning the art of turning over the garden and dusting flowers.
All seemed good and it looked like we go away with it, except.
Mum did keep complained that if she got to 60mph the car filled up with a white mist....
Ah, blue fire extinguishers!
I'm *just* old enough to remember the switch-over from Red/Blue/Black (and was there another too? Green or Yellow?) to all being red.
I have to say, as a dyslexic: making all of them Red has NOT made anything easier for me.
Back was CO2 iirc, Blue: water? Red, was that foam or powder?
I remember being at an outdoor party one chilly autumn evening on a farm. I barely knew the dimwitted, kind of eccentric guy that was hosting the party. We're all gathered around the bonfire talking and drinking and he comes out of the house with a large pan of his used motor oil and decides to dispose of it by hurling the contents onto the fire. Cue the huge flash, seething mushroom cloud, and immense wave of heat. I'm sure I only escaped flash burns because I was wearing a heavy coat. I may have seen my skeleton in the flash like in a nuclear explosion. When everything settled down and everyone that scrambled away in terror came back, we all noticed a fine spray of soot and oil drops on our clothing and faces. Since you can't easily ignite oil with a lighter, he apparently didn't realize how flammable it can be when you toss about 1-2 gallons onto a blazing fire.
and he comes out of the house with a large pan of his used motor oil and decides to dispose of it by hurling the contents onto the fire.
I used to go winter camping with a small group of motorbike riders from my club, usually for 2 or 3 days between Christmas and new year, and the custom is that the last night we'd be making oliebollen (basically donuts without the hole, or deep-fried sweet dumplings), after which the pan of oil would be upended into the campfire. After sufficient warning, with everybody except the thrower at a decent distance, and with a forceful swing so that the oil doesn't end up near oneself. Haven't seen it go wrong more than just slightly, in over 20 years.
And the effect is very worthwhile.
At Uni I was I the kitchen once when someone placed a heavily iced ' burger' of some sort found in the back of the fridge directly into a frying pan of boiling fat.
The sheet of flame removed most of his fringe, but fortunately did not set fire to anything else.
One of my son's classes had a practical demonstration of pouring water on a frying pan fire. They did it outdoors in the car park, and invited the local fire brigade along to watch just in case. It was impressive, and hopefully a lot of kids learned an important lesson. The fire chief said his team appreciated the demonstration because normally they don't get to see that bit of the event, they just get invited to clear up the mess afterwards,
We used to do that demo in the labs, with just a tablespoon or so of oil. Still very impressive with a flame up to the ceiling.
We ensure to mask off a smiley face etc on the tiles do the demo and remove the tape ;-)
Cannot ever think why we were banned.
(Maybe it had something to do with melting the fire detectors with one enthusiastic demo....)
And here I thought my aviation maintenance teacher was the only pyrotechnic with a teaching licenses.
He decided to end our course on the different types of batteries by retiring a battery that was well past it's end of life period. More specifically he decided to demonstrate the hazards of thermal runaway with a 24 cell NiCad battery... on the backside of airport property... without telling anyone except his boss who lived and worked 3 states away that approved of disposing of the battery in an educational manner.
Apparently his boss wasn't informed of what that educational manner was, that it was going to be done under the flight path of a regional airport, and without advance notice to the Kitty Hawk Airfreight office we were renting our shop space from. He rigged it, ran a couple of LONG cords to it to start the charge process rigged it and ushered us all back behind a plexiglass shield. Nothing happened for about a minute while he explained the internal mechanics, then it started to smoke, then flame, and then hell broke loose and a piece of the sheet metal that housed the cells in a cluster was imbedded in the asphalt a few inches from out protective cover- and the batter had been replaced with a small crater.
If nothing else everyone one left class with a firm conviction to double and triple check every cell in a battery and make sure they were wired properly. If not for others safety, then because we could still hear the college dean chewing out our career center teacher over the phone even when we got to the parking lot.
In a similar vein, I was at school with a guy who thought it would be fun to pour petrol on a fire before lighting it, not realising that the vapour pressure of petrol is quite high and the flames therefore tend to flash back. In this case, to the empty can he was holding. He needed skin grafts from his thigh to replace the skin he no longer had on his hand.
I have a few hard rules when it comes to (camp)fires. NO liquid fuels of ANY kind is number one. No gasoline, no diesel, no kerosene, no lighter fluid, no lamp oil. If it's even remotely flammable, keep it away from the fire or get my boot to the crotch.
Similar thing happened to my sister. Although she was smart enough to use only a small amount when lighting the garden waste in the incinerator, AND she ensured the metal can was sealed & well away from the incinerator before going back & lighting it. Safety first!
What she learned though, was what people didn't put enough emphasis on, just how fast petrol evaporates. No major damage, but she looked quite surprised for a while after that, from dim memory.
I fondly remember a physics teacher who showed us all exactly what happens when you try to put out an oil fire with water.
There was a whole catechism of follow up questions, one of which was "so what would happen if I used this bucket of sand, instead?"
He showed us that, too. By the time he finished, we all realised that "being completely bald" was actually a mark of extreme cool.
Hmm, I grew up in the Sierra Nevada in California. My dad was a black powder enthusiast and had a cap-and-ball muzzle loader he liked to shoot at targets, slowly, since each shot required wiping the barrel, measuring and pouring in an amount of black powder, ramming home a lead ball, rinse and repeat. I think his record rate was three shots a minute, but that is another tale. My brother was interested in theater and conceived the idea that black powder would be ideal for special effects, like Gandalf vanishing in a puff of smoke. However, he had the odd handicap of having difficulty lighting anything on fire, even black powder. One of my sisters saw this sad performance and took pity. While my brother had trouble igniting anything, that particular sister had the family nickname of "one match." Her ability to start fires in wet wood was scary. Naturally she succeed remarkably and caught the flash in her face. No serious damage, but I became aware of it when I heard her coming up the driveway trailing blue smoke and bluer language. She still has not quite forgiven me for putting her out by shoving her head under the faucet. Only minor temporary inconvenience as her eyebrows and bangs grew back. Life in the country.
A couple o decades ago I was working for an "expedition" is Israel. They were excavating a site in the Bet Netopa Valley north of Nazareth. One evening the directors threw a staff and labor party at the site (the "labor" were students who paid for the privilege of experiencing sweat, dust, scorpions, and discovering whether they were allergic to fig tree sap). Toward the end of the evening the cook, a Palestinian Christian, who, with his wife and daughters, produced a very fine meal of grilled meat fresh, various sorts of flat breads baked on site, rice, and fresh vegetables, imbibed a tad to much beer. We got a bonfire going and while waiting for a ride home, the cook tossed a very liberal amount of fuel (gasoline I think) on the fire. After that his wife and children dragged him off. I heard the next morning he couldn't find his eyebrows. Things quieted down and we sat and enjoyed the dark, and the distant thump and flare of artillery shells detonating beyond the mountains on Jordanian (or southern Syrian? border, east of the Jordan Valley and the Sea of Galilee.
Ours was "The Purple Stick of Thumping" delivered to the poor soul, by the Engineering Team** (33 people packed around the desk), silent and glaring.
The only way to have it removed was someone had to screw up worse than whatever got our ire up in the first place.
** Nobody in Eng could screw up as bad as a sales flunky and occasionally someone from Admin. V-and-C level employees were not exempt and PSoT made a few laps through the upper floors.
One office where I worked, the Boss had his desk crossways at the end of the office so he could keep an eye on us minions. He had a large ball of newspaper wrapped up in hundreds of elastic bands, attached to a nail in the ceiling by a long string of elastic bands, so it rested on the floor beside his desk. He called it his Boomertwang, and if anyone made a stupid mistake, he would pick it up and hurl it at the offender, whereupon the elastic bands would return it to his desk. Fun ensued when the offender managed to catch the ball and hurl it back at the Boss (Gordon), and everyone else in the office would get involved for about ten minutes.
I'm a PM & I discussed something similar with a team of 13 devs i was managing all but one were overjoyed by the idea. The project we were working on was business critical with a changing requirement and ridiculous timescales, It was supporting the opening of the domestic gas market so we had to keep evolving the software to keep a competitive advantage, In addition I had to implement new modules each month as the market opened and we put customers on supply then started taking payment and then billing etc.
I described my delivery approach as 'just a little late' rather than just in time as the vendor was releasing buggy modules we had to test and fix before putting into live operation. The guys came up with some stunning work arounds, edited live data files to make sure they would pass through the registration system or respond to unannounced changes in interface we even had to implement the famous fix if error code <> 0 then error code becomes zero. I did consider buying a pair of spurs but as we were working a minimum of 50 hours a week we never had the time to get to a shop when they were open.
It was an interesting project and I've never worked in an environment like it since (thankfully for my sanity).
We would come across a problem identify a root cause and report it but then have to discuss how we got the days registration files through the gateway. Whilst I usually insist on zero risk changes we didn't have the time to properly test so I was left to choose the lowest risk option. The highest business risk was not registering customers.
I used to have a toy clanger. For when someone dropped one, they'd have one to carry on with while they sorted it out.
Mind you, for people that tried to hide they'd dropped a clanger, and tried to cover it up, if I discovered it and got excuses, I kept the rear half of a plastic rat in a desk drawer that I'd bring out and place in front of them (they weren't allowed to have it, just to show that I did indeed have a rat's ass, and I wasn't giving it).
We had the Carlos Fandango Wally Wheelie Award - a beat up Dinky toy bubblecar tastefully mounted on a lump of polished hardwood. It was awarded to the person most recently involved in a Very Embarrassing Incident involving a company car. Once awarded, it was the recipients duty to track down the next qualifying employee. There was only one rule: it couldn't be awarded posthumously.
There was a very special customised version awarded to one luckless individual. He'd parked on the beach at Morecambe Bay and misjudged the returning tide. He got the car stuck, couldnt get anyone to tow it clear, panicked and went to retrieve his kit. In the excitement he missed his footing, fell over and knocked himself out. He ended up speding the night in Morecambe Hospital whilst his car floated around on the tide.
>Waves at anyone from Protech Instruments<
It is amusing when people park below the high tide line and get swamped. I recently parked some 250 yds and 20 ft up a hill from the high tide mark and went on a kids sports day trip by bus. It was a blustery day and I returned to find the wrack line (foam and seaweed) perfectly bisecting the gap between my front and rear axles and several of the people I had the day trip with spent time wandering around the council car park as their cars weren't where they left them.
Dont mess with the sea - its getting angrier!
I worked for a support organisation where it was classed as normal to finish the work day in Manchester late, drive up to the lakes to a customer site, return home in the small hours and still hit the office by 9am.
The last year I was there we had 3 serious car accidents caused by fatigue one of which lead to a colleague sustaining life changing brain injuries and another where the engineer was off work for 3 months. I had a near miss o a long straight section of the M6 when the lorries horn in front of me woke me shortly before I ran under the back of his trailer. Another colleague ran through the cones at some roadworks. After the road crew pulled out the cones under his car he was about to drive off when they pointed out that he'd ripped hist brake pipes off when he hit the cones.
Some company car prangs can be funny but don't forget we are not invincible, long hours no sleep and driving don't mix well over a long period.
The company did respond and started mandating an 8 hour sleep period after a late call out and insisting we got hotel rooms if there was a long drive home.
You were lucky! Most companies I have worked for would have said rude words beginning with the letter "F". Sleep is optional. One time I worked for 3 days straight. They told me if I went home to sleep, I'd be fired. Fortunately I was a sometimes-musician and I knew people who could get me the stuff to stay up for 3 days straight. Interestingly, the company didn't test for those substances in any drug test.
Not an experienced, BOFH-aware coffee drinker that is, otherwise they'd know to put away the coffee, tea, and basically all fluid and solid choking hazards while reading.
Also, breakable stuff that might be subject to forceful acceleration due to uncontrolled muscle movements, for good measure.
Actually that isn't all that funny, the incident happened in the 80's & I got a third hand version relayed by a lecturer who taught another student on another course.
Two engineers sent to a substation, one was instructed to power cycle a transformer & the other to trace an arcing issue. alas the arcing & resulting explosion happened literally in front of the other engineer burning the guy alive, from my recall he clung to life for a week, the resultant flame also destroyed the interior of the company vehicle (They had left the door open).
Where I worked, the building power transformer blew up in the middle of the night. It was in a room across from the guard station. When queried, the guard said, "Yeah, there was a hell of a noise."
"Did you tell anyone?"
"No, I thought it was someone else's responsibility.
When they replaced the transformer (live) two guys held 2x4's and braced themselves to pull backwards. A third person reached over the 2x4's to attach the power leads. Everyone was very serious. If anything had happened the 2 2x4 guys were ready to pull as hard so they could to pull the third person back.
Not a job I would want.
Back in the mists of time, concluding a survey of the waters adjacent to Faslane & packing up the fishing boat that had been used to pull the sonar, the main surveyor went to shut down the associated power supply with the longest wooden beam to hand & let it discharge of it's own time constant. Fishing boats captain* commented along the lines of
"Och aye issnae scared o that thing to get too close!"
If it arc's over, he's dead**!
Oh!
* & ** - Icon.
Saw something not as dramatic at one of my offices a few years back.
A car had driving into the transformer out on the street, knocking it out of action for a few hours. The electrical company guys came out and fixed it, but something wasn't quite right as it blew up a week later. It blew the panel clean across four lanes of road and a grass divider in one go.
Taking lunch outside a very large coal-fuelled power station, sitting in the company car with my assistant, munching through some indifferent sandwiches, we noticed two people get out of a car parked nearer to the building than us. They were walking past one of the huge oil-filled transformers, when there was a cataclysmic BANG!
The transformer and the two pedestrians no longer existed.
Our car was wrecked by flying debris, but my assistant and I were largely unhurt. The Board of Trade inquiry was one of the more unpleasant experiences of my life.....
To be fair to the boss by this point, he's probably invested in health and safety* workman boots rated at 10,000 volts like any good sparky will own.
(* for his own health and safety rather than the wooly PPE Form filling kinda stuff).
Just keep an eye out for thumb tacks I would expect.
Long ago in college the group I worked with had 2 Cyber 170/730 mainframes. The machine room had all the usual stuff including a big monitoring panel for alarms -- fire / environment / power / etc. Lots and lots of lights. And a button on it innocuously labelled LAMP TEST. Invariably someone would ignore warnings and go press it. LAMP TEST lit up all the lights. Also triggered the alarm relays which included the environmental klaxons. Was always great fun!
I worked in a lab once which had a continuous alarm.
A beeper went off every 2 seconds to let you know it was OK, if the beeper ever stopped - that meant an alarm, or that the alarm system had failed. Logically sound, but induced twitching paranoia in everyone that worked there.
Especially since it was the sort of place where if there ever was an accident you just paint over that bit of the map and rename all the surrounding towns.
Similar rules in nuclear power stations, except everything is duplicated but producing differing notes from the 2 halves. Affectionately known as the bip-bop generator.
I wasn't directly involved (worked for a company making the systems) but suspect it was if both tones went then you had to evacuate as you then didn't have a known working way to trigger an evacuation if needed.
I had a client a while ago with a site in a southern
UK city. One of the contractors re-fitting the kitchens, I think, decided that they would turn off the electricity supply over a weekend while they removed the old electric kitchen appliances (ovens, hobs, etc.) and installed the new ones.
Fortunately they mentioned this plan to a manager midweek, who immediately cancelled said plan, and insisted that any temporary downtime of the supply be planned with all of the building's inhabitants.* The organisation had some serious mainframes, literally thousands of PCs, and also supplied power to some mobile phone aerials on the roof under a separate contract. Careful planning allowed the site to be powered whilst changing the kitchen equipment. Disaster averted.
*Moral: Managers do have their uses after all. :o)
Most large organisations have energy monitoring teams financed completely by getting refunds from energy companies over billing.
Every month suppliers screw up change of ownership and add properties to te account erroneously, meter readings are miskeyed or missing and result in overcharges and tariff changes 'magically happen outside the t's and c's of the contract.
The same should be true of telecoms teams but for some reason senior managers don't seem to understand that moves and changes are often not made correctly.
I ran a fixed line migration project a couple of years ago and ended up cancelling 300 fixed lines 10's of data links and had to challenge £15,000 in 'cancellation charges.
One small office theoretically had 5 incoming phone lines spread across 3 suppliers but only 1 incoming cable. It had been like that of 5 years and was not an isolated occurrence but when you have
> The same should be true of telecoms teams but for some reason senior managers don't seem to understand that moves and changes are often not made correctly.
Back when I used to work for a major Uk telecomms, part of the WFH bundle was a dedicated line - ISDN originally, then ADSL.
A few years after getting a second ADSL line, I left said company. But the ADSL line still worked; I think the last time I tested it was about 5 years after starting my new job.
And while I left that house a few years ago, for all I know, that ADSL line is still operational!
A couple of years ago I was called out to our site's bowling alley (residential outdoor activities centre) when one of the instructors was having issues with an overhead monitor on one of the lanes.
This was just a cheap 47" TV on a roof bracket, but for some reason it wouldn't come on. The red standby light was on (so it was getting power) but it refused to respond to the remote control. We tested the remote (just point an infrared remote at your phone camera, you can then confirm if its working) but the TV simply wouldn't fire. We decided that powercycling the unit would be the best approach...
We didn't have access to a tall enough ladder to get at the TV, and there was a group due within a few minutes. In the end I walked up to the main breaker panel for the building and looked for the breaker for the TVs. When I couldn't find it I turned to the instructor and asked
"do you have to reset anything on the pin-setters after a power cut?"
"No."
"Well, there's only one thing for it then..."
And I dropped the big three-phase main switch on the panel, shutting down that whole section of the building. We patiently waited 30 seconds, threw the big red switch back on and voila! One working TV!
Inflammable is confusing because people are no longer taught either Latin or about prefixes. What do you say when a scratch or similar goes all red and nasty looking? it has become inflamed (not "flamed"). This is because there are two different meanings for the prefix in-. One has the negative connotations e.g. insensitive, infallible and is probably more common. The other has a variety of meanings such as "in" or "into" or expressing intensity (see what I did there?).
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