Birthday trauma for the chemist at the coal mine.
I'm not likely to forget one birthday. It was one of those days at work where everything goes wrong. We hired a light truck to take three men and a lot of laboratory equipment to a mine site about two hours drive away. There had been a serious roof fall and they needed to re-enter the mine to recover it and some equipment. That meant a team of mines rescue specialists and my team to monitor gas safety. All at enormous expense.

We loaded up the truck and set out on time. We got about five minutes down the road and the truck started making a serious sounding squeaking noise. So we returned to the lab and investigated. Could not see anything wrong, and so I took it for a short drive along the street. It squeaked until I got the thing out the gate, then the noise stopped.

So we made it to the mine. I had sent a couple of essential but heavy items ahead but they had not been delivered, despite a promise from the carrier. However they were not expected until 2pm so no worries. 2pm came and went, then 3pm, 4pm etc. We were trying to phone the carrier but no answer. Finally the customer managed to track him down in one of the local pubs. Pissed, naturally. The equipment was of course sitting in the carrier's yard, where it had been for two @*%^$ days. They told me later they never used his services. I don't wonder why.

By the time we got it all together and hooked up, it was 7pm or later. Then it had to warm up and stabilise. One of the assistants I had was completely useless, you had to tell him to do everything and as soom as he'd done it would go into neutral. This was despite three day's training just a few days before and years of laboratory experience in other fields on his part. (They sacked him a few months later.)

Finally about 8.15pm, six hours late the system had settled down. Gas flow rates were steady and the most sensitive of the two detectors was giving a low noise signal. Huzzah!

Trouble was that the less sensitive one, the one that never gave trouble wasn't working. It normally gave a lovely big signal for oxygen in air. This time it was just a little bump. We checked electrical connections every way we knew. Nothing seemed to be wrong. Nothing I did short of opening the instrument and pulling the detector apart made any difference.

About midnight we gave up. Back at the laboratory I pulled the detector to bits. Tiny blobs of semi-conductor held on the finest of wires you have seen, they were almost invisible. I went over them with a magnifying glass. Could not see anything wrong. So I put it all back together and started the system up. It worked perfectly.

Just to cap things off.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Tue 28 Sep 2010, 14:02, Reply)