It would have been handy Horus, if it were.. We could have dragged a couple of beers out of it.. My colleague certainly looked like he needed one.. or 5 !Horus wrote:Bill wrote:I don't suppose it was fridge shaped by any chance?I heard 3 loud bangs on the walls, while I was busy poking my finger into a huge cold spot in the room, trying to determine it's shape.
No, It was spherical, about 4 feet high, and right at the area of the room we needed to get to. Basically it was an oblong building housing electronic equipment that was mounted against the walls, only one pedestrian door in to the building, which was situated on a vast expanse of open fields.
After the bangs, one straight after the other on each wall, as though someone was hitting each wall in turn with a bloody big sledge hammer, we ran out of the door, I went right out of the door around the building, my colleague went left, and we met up at the back of the building, NOTHING to be seen anywhere ! No where for anyone to just hide, it was almost like daylight with the moon shining down, you could see for miles..
Security drove up in their Land Rover and asked if we were OK. We said "yes, fine"...
They said that they never came up to this part of the area if they could at all help it, the other one re-itterated the point by opening the back doors of the Land Rover and tried to set the dogs on a search.. they refused to budge.. These were properly trained dogs, not your "Group 4" security rubbish, these dogs were trained to kill if necessary..
Another thing that happened along similar lines, that for most have no explanation..
We placed some equipment on unfamiliar land, in the only place it could really be put. This equipment required a big generator to run it, and in order to do that, the equipment has to be earthed. Normally you would hammer a a couple of copper billets into the ground with an earth lead attached to them, and that would easily suffice. However, due to the ground being very shayley, we had to get the engineers to come out and drill a deep hole and reach better ground for the purpose of earthing.
so, while they were busy drilling I had made up longer earth leads and attached the billet and equipment, my colleague had gone to make up a copper sulphate solution to pour down the hole prior to dropping the billets in.
They finished their job and left us to it.
I have to stress, that at no point was this equipment attached to the generator, as a good earth has to be secured first, or you can kill the equipment, and there are rigorous procedures and tests and form filling to be done before the connections can be made.
So, my colleague checks my work, is happy I have done a good job on the earth leads. he pours in the copper sulphate solution down the holes and he gets one billet on one side and I get the other and we just drop them in the holes and walk off to get our spades, to back fill the holes.. next thing a huge bang ! and the equipment is smoking like it has just been dragged out of a fire ! quite probably just at the time when the billets found the bottom of the holes..
I was lucky, I didn't have to call those who were in charge and tell them about a multi million pound piece of equipment that had just gone bang.. after the initial rant, and my colleague telling them exactly what we did,
it was a case of "never mind, we will install a new one elsewhere" !!