Let’s Blow Something Up
The company had a bomb shelter, with three-foot-thick concrete walls, located in a remote corner of the parking lot. Dougie was the manager of the shelter. He was fat and lazy; in fact, he worked hard at being lazy and took pride in it. Instead of helping us set up and conduct a test, he made the job unnecessarily arduous.
The wheels on his oversized desk chair were flat on one side because of his massive weight and lack of movement. He spent his days gambling on games of gin rummy, with a set of coworkers. They rotated in and out of the shelter, seemingly on queue. The bomb shelter was isolated, and whenever someone walked through the door, Dougie flipped down a large desk pad, to conceal the gin-rummy hands on his desk.
When October rolled around, Dougie put the card games and gambling on hiatus and hauled out a set of colored pencils and card-stock paper, which he obtained from the company’s stationery supply. For the next eight weeks, he spent eight hours a day, hand-drawing his Christmas cards. He cranked them out at the rate of about one a day; they were detailed and beautiful. He was quite an artist.
Once a week, Dougie took his boss out for an expensive lunch. He also gave his boss a valuable 12-gauge shotgun for Christmas, and in return, the boss turned a blind eye to Dougie’s vices.
About two years after receiving my engineering degree, I was analyzing and testing Minuteman ICBM circuitry. This story is about a spectacular test failure and it’s unexpected consequences.
Read about it below.
The Minuteman III missile has three stages. As each stage’s fuel is consumed, that stage separates and falls back towards earth. Explosive devices, called squibs, electronically fire to blow apart the hardware holding the missile’s stages together.
My boss, a pilfered a few squibs and took them home to remove several large tree stumps in his backyard. The squibs did a great job, although my boss had some difficulty explaining his stump removal process to the local police who were summoned by an alarmed neighbor.
My Observation: Be careful with explosives.
Three of us were in the bomb shelter conducting a test to verify that an electromagnetic environment wouldn’t affect the squibs. We had the Minuteman firing circuitry connected to seven live squibs.
As we were testing, Dougie poured himself a fresh cup of hot coffee and sat in his chair, waiting for the next gin-rummy hand to be dealt. With the fury of an apocalypse, our test failed, and three squibs fired simultaneously, resulting in a deafening “boom.” It shook the massive shelter walls. The sudden noise startled Dougie and set his massive carcass into motion. He scalded his fat belly with his freshly brewed cup of hot coffee that remained tightly clutched in his chubby hand. Dougie left for the emergency room, where some unfortunate nurse had to rub ointment on his belly burns. Poor Dougie (sarcasm) and pity the poor nurse (not sarcasm) on duty that day.