The unfortunate exccident.

Yesterday a “major catastrophe” as my boss put it, occurred to one of our strainers. It’s a rubber filtration/forming machine that works kind of like a spaghetti maker but can only manage to squeeze out one thick, flat piece of noodle. For whatever reason may it be a pressure difference in the tubes, faulty equipment or someone unknowingly tried to make noodle out of a piece of dough that’s been in an oven overnight… the rubber managed to push right through the mould, splitting a 1½” piece of circular steel disk and a heat treated steel ring that used to be fully attached to the framework. That’s an estimated 20,000lbs of pressure. I have never seen noodle do that.

The crew was shocked and amazed, they asked me to take pictures of the crime scene while they juggled the liability and how much this is going to cost them. I clicked away at every possible angle. It was a horrendous sight. At least our strainer is now at a peaceful place, where the rubber runs free and the pressure is at most, atmospheric.

The next day, the boss presented me with the piece of steel ring that stripped off the machine. Incomplete and jagged, it threatened to cut me if I dared touch it. The ring was to be Fed-exed to Germany for investigation. I took my precious to the shipping office. After a gazillon layers of bubble wrap, I sealed the box. The woman at the shipping office, we’ll call her Shirley (mostly because that’s her name), weighed the package at 2lb and brought over the seemingly simple paper work. I struggled with the German address, the street name had a letter in it that looked like a greek beta but fatter…

Shirley proceeded to fill out the rest,
“Do you know how much this is worth?” she asked
“What’s worth? How much is the stuff in the package you mean?”
“Yes.”

I had no idea, but I knew the ring was important; the ring was unique; we cannot lose it.
“uhhh… it’s priceless.”
“I can’t write down priceless!!” Shirley said after laughing hysterically at me.
“oh,” I said, thinking quickly… “actually, it’s broken, so… it’s worthless.”
Thinking some more after seeing the look on her face… “well, it’s important, we can’t lose it… so it’s somewhere in between priceless and worthless.”
“Just estimate something.” Shirley laughed as I was starting to calculate what 2lb of steel is going for these days… and ultimately decided it was a couple hundred (the average price of everything in this world I guess).

“ok that wasn’t so hard was it?” said Shirley, “now, what should I put for the item’s description?”
“uhhhh… evidence?”

The ring is out of my hands now. All it cost me was some dignity, the equivalent of a couple hundred bucks. Good thing there's an endless reserve.