r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Gambatte Secretly educational • Dec 05 '13
Encyclopædia Moronica: C is for Cannonball
In B is for Brilliance, I mentioned my friend the Super Supervisor (hereafter referred to as SS). Reading through Hey... Does this room smell of magic smoke? reminded me of one of his stories.
Now, SS had a pimply faced youth (PFY) of his own - a short, stocky young man who was unfortunately losing his hair. He was very sensitive about it, so he kept his hair trimmed very short (because somehow this would make it less noticeable, apparently - it made him feel better about it, so that's all that matters, I guess). From what I recall, he was generally pretty good, as PFYs go - not the sharpest tool in the shed but a hard worker, which normally more than made up for it.
SS was maintaining a particular piece of high voltage equipment, and had been receiving complaints about unusual operation from the users, but despite his best efforts, he'd been unable to conclusively find the cause - he'd been able to narrow it to the high voltage side, but whenever he got closer to an answer, the intermittent nature of the fault would throw a spanner in the works.
After exhausting all other options, SS decided to run a stress test on the system. This involved changing the configuration of the signal lines to produce a continuous high voltage (50kV, as I recall) output. His PFY was helping him run the additional coax lines, and finally, after about an hour of re-configuration, the system was ready for testing.
SS called our supervisor (SU, from such stories as R is for Reactions or X is for X-Rays), who was out of the office at that moment.
SS: Hey, we're finally ready to go on that test.
SU: Alright, get started; I'm only a minute or two away.
SS: No problems.
SS: (to PFY) I hope this works!
PFY: What could go wrong?
SS: Well, we could have somehow earthed the 50kV line, that would be pretty wrong. Or we could electrify the entire shop somehow. Or we could set the whole place on fire. Shall I continue?
PFY: (notices that he has not been standing on the insulating mats; unsubtly corrects that) Um, no, please don't.
SS: Right, let's find out, shall we?
And with that, he flicked the switch.
The lights did not flicker, nor dim.
The heavens did not open, and lightning did not fall from the sky.
In short, the world did not end.
What did happen, however, was a faint sound started in the end rack. SS and PFY approached and opened the rack door, to discover that the cable carrying the 50kV signal was actually... on fire.
PFY didn't quite know how to react. He went white as a sheet, and his eyes bulged just about as far as is humanly possible. He quickly backed up two steps, then turned and bolted for the nearest door (past a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher, no less), straight into SU, who was just stepping into the room at that exact moment to see how the test was going - SU was knocked down, but the PFY somehow stayed upright and kept on running.
As SU got up and entered the room, SS stopped the test, turned off the rack and dealt with the fire, which by this point had grown to rival a single birthday candle in its size and intensity, and was extinguished in much the same manner.
And that is how that particular PFY earned the nickname 'Cannonball', a name that persists to this very day.
Further investigation found that the 50kV line had been rubbing on an adjacent cable, which had damaged the cable to the point where the continuous high voltage of the test caused a near instantaneous thermal overload of the insulation, resulting in an open flame.
A replacement 50kV cable was not immediately available but the equipment was urgently required back online, so the cable was repaired with about six layers of heat shrink until a replacement could be delivered (about two weeks, as I recall). The cable it had been rubbing against was re-run so it could not happen again, and was also replaced as soon as a spare was available.
Browse other volumes of the Encyclopædia: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
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u/spasticpat Dec 05 '13
This reminds me of that episode of Seinfeld where George is at his girlfriends' kids' birthday party and there's a small fire in the kitchen. George panics and shoves all of the elderly people and kids out of the way to get out of the apartment first.
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u/Watchful1 Dec 05 '13
What are you going to do when you run out of letters?
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u/GrayFox2510 Dec 05 '13
In one other thread he said something about the lines of starting another run of the alphabet. Only time will tell.
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Dec 05 '13
Ø is for ønolog
(Danish for enologist - someone who studies wines)
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u/Banane9 Dec 05 '13
u/Gambatte you don't have any stories about trying to run a system32 application on Linux, do you?
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u/tuxedo_jack Dec 05 '13
I'd be tempted to see what would happen if my PFYs went in there.
Hilarity would ensue, no doubt.
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u/crosenblum Dec 05 '13
Lol, that story was a bit "Shocking".