Working Blind

I fucked up.

That prototype artillery gun-flash detection system I've been working on is a huge pain in the ass. It's so sensitive to light that the test procedure they came up with requires you work in a darkroom. The engineers stripped out or covered up every single lightbulb and LED in the front panels of all the test equipment and I've been forbidden to use a flashlight in the room at any time during the test process. I have to work blind, and set everything up by sense of touch. Problem is, when I walk into the room my eyes are trying to adjust to the total blackness and I wander into desks and shit. The first time or two when I showed up to start the next phase on the detector I damn near tripped over something and broke my neck. Now I have some landmarks in the room that if I bump into them I know where I'm at. Kinda. All I need is some dark glasses and a red tipped cane.

So I have to show up in the black pit of darkness a few times during the shift and keep the tests going. There's a unit under test positioned just perfectly over a fixture. My job is to make sure the previous test phase completed, then precisely reposition the unit, and continue the next test. It's damn difficult. Since I'm doing it all by touch it's easy to make a mistake and hose it good. Up until now it's all been fine, but I got word today that I messed up the positioning last night and we've lost days worth of test time. I'm in the doghouse. Woof.

I've been really interested about this system and what it does so I pestered a few of the engineers with all sorts of questions about it. The way it's supposed to work is this: The operators put up a series of detectors that are so sensitive they can see individual artillery muzzle flashes on the horizon on a bright, sunny day. The system triangulates the position information in seconds and can do two things almost instantly. It can calculate where the incoming artillery rounds will impact, so they can try to get people out of the way, and it can feed the muzzle flash position to counter-artillery units so they can fire back at them and blow them up real good. I think I can dig it. If we end up successfully getting a handful of these things completed there's a potential out there for a bunch of orders. Time is short though, and we're under a lot of pressure to deliver.