Quote:
Originally Posted by mental4astro
The following has nothing to do with particle accelerators, but it's in the same vein...
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OK you started me. Although the exact location has been lost I'm assured the basics of this are true. There was a factory which had a lab attached (presumably for quality control tests). In the lab was a gas chromatograph which was set up each day to do an overnight autorun (GC samples take from perhaps 30minutes to >1hr each to run). During each run the oven temperature is ramped from near ambient temperature to 200-300 degrees.
The problem was that for a short time each night the results (chromatograms) exhibited a noisy baseline and the elution time of the various compounds shifted. It worked fine all day and for the rest of the night. So specialist instrument technicians were called in. After exhaustive testing they could find no problems. So they set up a web cam to record exactly what happened during the night. What did they find? A worker from the factory doing night shift sneaked into the lab with his meal, opened the door to the GC oven and slipped his meal in to warm up! So of course the oven temperature was not what it should have been thus changing elution times and the sudden change of temperature upset the detector (FID? TCD?) and so produced a noisy baseline. No permanent damage done but a lot of time and money wasted. I think management should have put a microwave in the lunch room.