'Engineers', my buttocks

The laboratory I work in is a dedicated area of The Company's building. It is similar to other laboratories in the building but different in feel because of the sound-proofed rooms, smell of grease, and large industrial chambers, plants and machinery, instead of electronic test equipment. Never the less, I tend to expect engineers from other disciplines to have some form of intelligence, the kind that stops them from arbitrarily opening doors to environmental chambers that have nothing to do with them or their tests. I am surprised far too often by my apparently unrealistic expectation. Luckily for them, the chamber was running a maintenance cycle and not involved in a days-long qualification test, but it was still an astonishing display of poor judgement.

When their test finishes, the same engineers decide that, rather than finding someone from my department, the best course of action is to switch off the chamber themselves. So it is that a large, noisy, industrial environmental chamber, controlled and data-logged by software running on a remote computer, is interrupted by untrained personnel turning off its three-phase mains power. This despite a warning from their previous incident. I swear, this is why bridges collapse.

Posted in Work |
Tags: climatic