An Experiment In Revenge

Spilled Isopropyl Alcohol does something to waxed tile flooring I never would have anticipated.

Last week in the Closed Area I was doing monkey work since there wasn't anything back in the Environmental Lab or in Final Test for me to blast through. When we have down time in the test areas I fall back to doing regular assembly work. That's cool, it keeps me busy. I use up a whole bunch of reagent grade Acetone and or Isopropyl Alcohol on a couple of the assembly processes in particular. I love the smell of Acetone. It's so pleasant. I could sniff it all night long and be in heaven. I really don't know why I like it so much, but I do. If some company made Acetone scented aftershave I'd probably wear it.

I was scrubbing away on some parts cleaning solder joints with some Isopropyl when the bottle ran dry. Had to go get some more. I went over to the fire-proof cabinet to fetch the Neoprene five gallon jug of the stuff and brought it back to my workstation. Accidentally I overfilled my bench container and I spilled a good amount onto the shop floor. It was a coffee achiever moment since my hand wasn't steady. I didn't think much of it at the time other than I wasn't going to bother to wipe it up. I'm lazy like that, yo. Isopropyl evaporates so damn fast anyway I thought to myself what's the point in cleaning it up? It will be gone on it's own in no time.

A day or two after that, obnoxious and stinky Mr. Janitor came into the Closed Area for his daily babysitting session to clean up and do Janitor stuff. Someone else got punished with having to be his escort that evening so I didn't pay him any attention until he started freaking about something he saw on the floor. He was being a total bitch about some spots or some shit in the center of the common assembly area and was questioning everyone about how his floor got ruined. Nobody could answer him about these mysterious spots and he became more agitated about it. I walked over from the front end of the production line and observed what he was pointing at. On the floor in front of one of the benches was a series of black rings that had eaten through the floor wax. Mr. Janitor whined about how much time he had put into waxing and polishing our floors and he demanded to know what had caused the rings. Nobody answered him. None of us knew what caused it to happen. He came back into the area with a menagerie of cleaning products and went to work on his precious floor. He didn't seem to have any luck until in desperation he pulled a straight-edged razor from his pocket and scraped the rings from the wax in the floor tiles by hand. I noticed Mr. Janitor put alot of work into his scraping. It was almost passionate the way he removed those ugly black rings. Hmmmm.

Later that night I was thinking about those nasty black rings in the floor. I remembered that I had been working at that bench earlier in the week and I spilled the Isopropyl Alcohol in that general area in front of the bench. I wondered if the spilled Isopropyl had cut into the wax and spread out in those almost perfect rings and then dried to collect mangy dirt and turn jet black. So I did an experiment. When no one was around I spilled some more Isopropyl on the floor in a particular spot and made it a point to check it in a couple of days. Sure enough, two days later in the exact spot I did the deliberate spillage those black rings appeared in the floor. Hmmmmm.

I have a plan.