There's probably about 4 people on Fark that have paid enough attention to me to know that I used to be a maintenance/distillation geek for a recycling company.

I made a mistake once, and it was EXPENSIVE.

I was still in the honeymoon phase, except the company was getting ready to move the entire plant. So I was expected to spin up juuuuust a bit faster than average. I'm not entirely unintelligent, but I only have so much bandwidth, so I kinda let the actual physics and chemistry of industrial distillation slide, and did what the boss said was the right thing to do.

Oops.

Hey, he's my boss, and he's been here a while, if he says do "x", he's probably right.

Well, turns out said boss was a REALLY good millwright, but he did not grok distillation in its fullness, especially with something you distill under vacuum because it does mean things if it's anyplace near 1 atm. Ethylene glycol can't be distilled at 1 atm because it'll straight up try to become plastic, and there'll be a fire.

So I did things his way, and I discovered that glycol will burn in a vacuum if you open the vacuum dump valve after "killing" the machine. Exposed burner tubes are HOT, glycol will dissociate, and if you let oxygen in, you WILL have a fire. See above.

Due to there not being enough oxygen, I made short-chain polyethylene glycol and pushed it through the entire distillation column. Kinda like teying to burn gasoline too rich and getting a lot of CO.

I basically filled the entire "inside" of an industrial process with carbon-rich plastic.

I realised there was an issue when I'd turned everything off, and the temperature kept going UP.

Cleaning the unit was a cast-iron cnut. I farked it GOOD. Best estimate I've heard is that my mistake (opening the "dump valve") cost in the low 6 figures due to both costs to remediate and lost production.

OTOH, I realised the "boss" wasn't clueful and I started aggressively Googling. I left because I can make vastly more running Tonka toys, but I'm confident that that particular farkup made me one of the best non-petrochem distillation techs in North America. I had those machines eating out of my hands.

Their new head maintenance guy depends pretty much solely on my apprentice to keep those machines happy. I'm pretty damn happy knowing I was able to teach a teenager to make those machines behave. Plus, my apprentice is a pretty awesome kid.

Tom Marvolo Bombadil: [Fark user image 666x375]

56 grams is definitely into the "more than just one person can use in a night" territory.

Frankly, that's into "kept all the electricians on the project wired for the night" territory.

If you're the sort to just bump it a bit at 3 am to keep the party going, 56 grams is... damn. a LOT of coke.

If you're that arsehole that spends the entire night in the bathroom, 56 grams is STILL a buttload of coke.

A "line" is well under a gram, even if you're greedy.

If you put it on a hooker's ass, you're probably going to lose some. Crack, you realise, is a biatch.