If you disagreed with your boss about how to handle a situation, would you insist on doing it your way if you knew your boss’s idea was really bad, or would you let your boss have his way and suffer the consequences?

In this story, one employee is in this exact situation, and he ends up letting his boss have his way. To make it even more interesting, this story takes place in a lab where they’re testing nuclear safety components.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

My Lab Supervisor and I argued over the test setup for a $90,000 custom, mechanically-timed relay. He won the initial argument, much to his regret.

I worked in a lab that conducted destructive and non-destructive testing for Class 1E nuclear safety components.

Since all manufacturers and all Nuclear Power Plants are “blacklisted” they cannot sell to one another. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not mess around, and one mistake will blacklist you.

So that’s where small labs like the one I worked at in the ’90s popped up. They would play middle man, buy from the manufacturer and sell to the plant.

Now on to the specific test they were conducting…

Also, because most of these plant designs are ancient, the pieces and parts that go in them are ancient, and you can’t just swap something else in because you like the look of it. Sometimes your safety components have to be a carbon copy of the original 1950s design.

So that’s why we were testing a custom made, outdated, one-off Westinghouse Relay with a very expensive 5″ diameter “Watch Spring” for precision timing. We had to test the current parameters at which it was designed to “trip” to be sure it would operate precisely as required.

This had us mounting it to a large station that generated precise amounts of electrical current across a large range, for testing purposes.

I had everything setup with the starting voltage (and therefore current) set to 0 and was going to slowly dial it up to the low end, to be sure the relay tripped.

His boss disagreed with him.

My boss argued that the test platform already started at 0 and climbed on its own, so just set it to auto.

I argued that if you set it to auto, it would start out with high voltage which generates high current, because it’s expecting more resistance since that’s much more typical, but this relay watch spring has extremely low resistance.

This went back and forth for awhile, until he pulled rank and demanded I set it to auto.

I debated just absolutely refusing, and I started to make utterances to that regard, but he was getting pushy, so I did it.

Here’s what happened…

We turned it on, there was a flash of blue light, a loud pop, some smoke, and when we looked, there was molten watch spring metal sliding down the inside glass cover of the relay.

He muttered, “Don’t say a freaking word,” and stormed out of the lab.

Good thing we had insurance for that stuff.

At least his boss didn’t somehow blame him. It seems that he realized it was his fault.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

It definitely sounds dangerous.

This person thanks him for his work.

Someone who works at a nuclear power plant weighs in.

We can only hope!

Good supervisors listen to their employees.

If you liked that post, check out this one about an employee that got revenge on HR when they refused to reimburse his travel.