Supervisor And Employee Argue About The Best Way To Test Something In The Lab, But The Supervisor Should’ve Listened
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Imagine setting up something at work, and your supervisor tells you to do it differently. If you thought your idea was better than the supervisor’s idea, would you push back or simply comply since it’s your supervisor?
In this story, one person who works at a lab is in this situation. He disagrees with his supervisor about how to set up a test, but he eventually has no choice but to give in and do things the supervisor’s way.
Keep reading to find out what happens.
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.
Here’s some context about what they were testing.
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So that’s why we were testing a custom made, outdated, one-off Westinghouse Relay with a very expensive 5″ diameter “Watch Spring” for precision timing.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.
OP disagreed with the boss about how to test it.
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.
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.
The boss should’ve listened.
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.
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 the boss knew it was his fault and that he should’ve listened. He just didn’t want to literally hear “I told you so.”
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
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It sounds like a recipe for disaster.
One person has multiple family members who were nuclear eingineers.
Someone eles who works at a nuclear plant weighs in.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an employee who isn’t happy with the company’s new time tracking rules, so decides to find a way around them.
Here’s another opinion.
Sometimes “I told you so” is implied.
The boss definitely knew he messed up. He could only blame himself for making a bad judgement call.
As OP said, at least they have insurance.
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