Banished

Late last night I was sitting at my cubicle remotely monitoring a half dozen or so tests. My unix machine is strictly for lab operations. Every few minutes I'd glance over at the screen to make sure nothing had seized up or failed, then go back to inputting data on Greasy Guy's report spreadsheets. He doesn't do much of the paperwork but you can bet when he hands those reports in to our bosses he will be sure to take all the credit for putting them together. Anyway, things were fairly quiet between our chamber area and the environmental lab out back. I figured it was going to be an easy night for a change.

Then loopy Mexican guy ran over to my desk completely freaked out.

I had a tough time trying to understand what he was saying. His English isn't bad, but I guess when he's stressed out he talks faster than he should and everything comes out jumbled up. The gist of it was, a chamber in the e-lab was killing power to everything under test including itself. Weird. I stood up from my chair and walked with loopy Mexican guy to check it out. When we arrived on the spot I noticed everything was dead. Odd. Hitting the master reset on the chamber and waiting for about a minute I began to power everything back up. Four instruments inside came on, the chamber came back online, and everything seemed normal. I triggered the test procedure through the chamber's manual control panel which is just to the right of the main door. The current temperature inside was a little on the warm side but that was okay since the chamber was ramping up to fifty five degrees when the thing decided to cut out. For about thirty seconds everything was fine and then the chamber went fucking apeshit.

Closely watching the digital temperature reading on the master control panel the temperature shot up from around mid-thirties to over a hundred degrees in seconds. An alarm went off, and the safety override killed power to everything instantly. Whoa. I'd never seen anything like this before. Again I reset the chamber, waited for a couple of minutes and then tried to restart the test procedure. Same thing happened, the temperature skyrocketed out of control and the whole thing shut itself down. Something was really wrong. As a failsafe so we don't destroy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment we have a redundant temperature sensor system on each chamber. If certain conditions arise, like the temperature suddenly going out of control like this, the failsafe shuts down the power instantly. At least that was working properly.

The loopy Mexican guy wasn't doing any good standing around just watching me so I asked him to go ahead and work on some other chambers while I tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Opening up the chamber door I was hit in the face with a steam cloud that fogged up my glasses. It was obvious that guy is still keeping the chamber door open too long at zero degrees. I climbed inside and checked the power connections to all the gear. It looked good. Nothing appeared to be shorted out or damaged. I triple checked the chamber's master control panel, and the temperature failsafe. Couldn't find anything wrong there either. Confused, I came to the conclusion something must have been very wrong with the temp chamber itself and that was clearly beyond my ability to fix. The only thing I could do was lock out the chamber and leave a note saying it was down for repair. I left voicemails for the lab technicians giving them a good description of what the problem was and which chamber to take a look at.

Next afternoon when I came into work I had a few urgent messages for me from the lab techs. They wanted to see me as soon as possible. More weirdness, I thought. The techs back there are all real sharp and I get along with them well. Part of the reason for that I think is due to the fact that any time I find shit that's been wrecked in the e-lab I let them know about it right away. We have a number of employees who use equipment in the e-lab, break it somehow, and then quietly walk away from it like nothing happened. Gotta love it. So, I get back to the environmental lab tech's office and they start grilling me about what happened last night like I'm in a dark room with a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling and I'm tied to a chair. Didn't take me long to realize they were extremely angry.

Turns out the reason why that chamber was fucked up is because someone had jammed a bunch of sweat socks into the ceiling. The socks had blocked air flow around a few thermistors that sense the temperature inside and feed that information back to the failsafe mechanism. Those sensors were effectively insulated by the sweat socks and that's what caused the temperature to look like it was spiraling upwards out of control. We don't stock a supply of sweat socks to use as tooling in our equipment so someone must have been bringing in a collection from home. I think I knew who that someone was. I told the tech crew about loopy Mexican guy causing the chambers to rain and I suspected he must have been using the socks to soak up water during testing so it wouldn't mess up any instruments. That's totally demented.

Later in the shift one of the lab techs found me. He said they got loopy Mexican guy to confess to bringing in those socks to block air vents from raining water down on boxes inside the chamber. As a result they have banished him from ever working in the lab again. He is not to touch any equipment or even set foot in the area. Heh. If he had only listened to what I had been trying to teach him none of this would have happened. What a fool. Well, that's one new person down. I wonder how long the other two will last...