Mysterious Slamming
I was working in a small room that made the "skins" to egg rolls. It was a new operation at the time. I handled the actual skin making machine. Another operator ran the dough mixer.
Every once in awhile we would hear this slamming noise. It was loud enough to startle us. We looked around and everything would be totally normal. Maybe a couple of hours later it would do it again.
The mysterious slamming would occur every day. In fact, it seemed to increase in frequency. This was getting to be a real distraction. The banging seemed to be coming from the direction of our stainless steel starch holding tank mounted on the wall. The tank had about a 40 gallon capacity.
We did not have the slightest clue what to do about the annoyance. We reported this condition, but when the anomaly did not affect the process and was only a pain to us, it went on largely ignored.
It didn't help that my co-worker in the room was maybe the biggest complainer who I have ever met. No one wanted to work with her. In fact, I'm pretty sure that because it was her, that they were all glad we were having the problem. Personally, I had no problem working with her.
Being in the Skin room was otherwise a pretty good job, I thought. I would stay on a job until I got bored with it, then I would just change jobs within the Company.
One day when the bang occurred, the Dough Mixer Operator yelled out. I remember not being able to get out of her what was going on. She said something about a spark. After that, she had no inclination to go near my machine. Her mind-set did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about my proximity to the starch bin. I kept watching her to see where she was looking.
One day this thing was popping like crazy so I kept watching for it. "Whoa!" There was a three foot long streak of blue lightning that jumped from the outside of a PVC pipe that pulled recycled starch from the line into the tank.
We studied the crazy phenomenon. The zapping was static electricity generated from starch sucking through the pipe. The micro-lightning jumping to the tank caused a dust explosion inside the tank. The slamming was the heavy stainless steel lid of the starch tank popping up with the explosion and slamming down with gravity.
Maybe the increase in explosions that day was due to a lack of humidity in the skin room or something. Conditions were just right for it though. I turned off the light in the room so people passing by could see the fantasia that was our work area. It was indeed a glorious display. It attracted quite a bit of attention as people were standing around being unproductive on the clock beholding its awesomeness.
Finally, the drain on human resources warranted some attention by supervision. Maintenance sent a guy over to figure out what to do. He was baffled and did not believe us until he saw it. He ended up running a grounding wire from the pipe to the floor. This solved the problem. He explained that the static electricity did not have much voltage, but had like, a million amps. We did not miss having it around.
Parking Lot Intervention
I was in the parking lot walking into work. I heard a scream and some slamming. I ran over and saw a guy who was a crew leader. He was slamming a woman up against the now caved-in fender of a pickup truck.
I pulled the guy off of her, and told him to stop. He gave me a shove, after which I just looked at him. He backed off after that.
The owner of the truck was really mad about his truck.
That was pretty much it. I was called into the office and gave my report. The woman beater got fired. The woman went to the hospital, and when she got out, she said I saved her life. We'll never know if that was true or not.