mystories

When I worked at the particle beam lab, we had a large electron injector about the size and weight of a locomotive. It had a large Marx high voltage generator in the back, which lived in a dumpster-sized tank of high voltage transformer oil, open on top. In order to position it for various experiments, it could be floated on air pads pressurized by compressed air, and pushed around by hydraulic cylinders.

One day, the hydraulic system failed, but it needed to be moved. The researcher figured we could fire up the air pads, making it essentially frictionless, and round up some physics grad students to simply push it into position.

We got everybody lined up along the back of the thing, turned on the air pads, and we started pushing. It didn't seem to budge, as it was quite heavy, so everybody kept pushing, not realizing that we were continuing to accelerate this huge mass (it's physics!). After a while, its motion was perceptible, so we stopped pushing. It crept across the equipment bay at a stately pace, until it hit the stops and ... stopped. The thousands of gallons of transformer oil, however, didn't. In a giant, slow motion slosh, the transformer oil started to pour over the front. Then it got sucked into the air pads, became atomized, and formed a thin, strange-smelling fog and making everything slippery.

That's when folks suddenly remembered that the exotic high voltage transformer oil was distinctly unhealthy, as well as capable of dissolving all sorts of rubber and plastic compounds - such as the soles of our shoes. We all got out of there, massively chagrined.