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After I got the Electronics degree, I went to work for a factory in Delavan called Borg Instruments. They made car clocks and controls for electric stoves, among other things. Not especially big, but a normal factory for the area. Maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty workers, four assembly lines, some automated parts inserters, a wave soldering setup, and various and sundry testing/rework/research labs.
I was the technician in the Quality Control department. Most of my job consisted of analyzing broken stove control circuit boards that came in from around the country to find out why they failed (in other words it was boredom of the highest calibre), but I also did testing on some of the vendor components, like power capacitors for the circuit boards. That was kinda fun. Solder a couple dozen caps to long power wires, hook the whole thing up to about a hundred volts DC - more than they would ever get in the real world - and pop the whole thing into a climate chamber. That's a big, huge refrigerator box thing that will cycle through any temperature range you set for it. From minus 80 degrees to hot enough to set paper on fire and back again, as many times as you want, and just about as fast as you want. If most of the little capacitors live through it, you can be pretty sure they'll last in a car clock that gets left out in a Minnesota winter or in a Texas parking lot for a couple weeks.
So, there I am. I've got the little capacitors soldered to the little wires, and I've got 'em hung nice and neat in the chamber box, and I've done this a few times so the process is pretty familiar. Connect the power to the caps, program the cycle into the chamber control, slam the chamber door shut with my elbow and throw that great big switch with my other hand. Click, thump, CHUNK.
And the whole factory shuts down.
The lights go out, the emergency battery backup lights come on, and there's that sound of all those motors and turbines going WHIRRRrrrrr till suddenly you can hear people talking through the walls and all the way at the other end of the plant.
I stood there for about five seconds with my jaw on the floor and my hand on the power switch. Then I took a look around. Nobody. I'm alone in the test lab.
I slowly pulled the chamber power switch to the off position, unhooked the power to the capacitors, and opened the chamber door. Then I walked quietly until I was a loooong way from the test chambers and started joining into the "Gee, I wonder what the heck happened, eh?" like everybody else. I'm thinking maybe if I can fake it long enough, I can come up with some kind of excuse. What the hell was it that I did wrong? If I'd hooked up the capacitors wrong some of them would have exploded like firecrackers but that would have happened right away, and those things are on a circuit breaker with a fuse backup. Maybe I programmed the temperature cycle wrong. Maybe I was supposed to check something or other before I hit the main power. What the heck did I do?
After two hours, they sent most of the crew home and kept a few people, including me, to walk around shutting off stuff and generally getting the place ready so when the power came back on, things wouldn't go flying around the floor. So far, nobody had asked me what I was doing when the lights went out.
Then, just about quitting time, the news came in that a construction crew with a back hoe had knocked out a booster station a few blocks away and cut power to about a square quarter-mile of the grid. Just by coincidence, that back hoe had hit that power box at exactly the same time I was hitting the power switch to that environment chamber.
Jeez.
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