Weird places you have worked

[jooopy]

I ran 13 intermediate care facilities for people with autism and mental retardation. The clients were mostly great. The direct care staff were real freaks of nature. Had to deal with over 120 of them. Stupid staff questions came in at all hours of the day & night (3shifts). One day I told the owner I was too sleepy to drive home so I slept on his office sofa a few hours then woke up & quit. I was a concert promoter back in the mid 90's. Booked reggae bands like Inner Circle (Bad boys bad boys watcha gonna do). I've worked in many design centers doing home interiors for picky people. I work with my Dad in retail flooring now. He's almost 70 and always right.

[absolom7691]

I worked at MWK Industries. Old school laser guys know that place. I was only there about 6 months, when they were still in Corona, but I worked with some awesome people and some really cool lasers and interesting gear. The place reminded me more of M5 (Mythbusters) than a laser shop, when I think back. We had stacks of ALC60x heads... I would say close to 50 of them. Had a couple of 1W waveguide CO2 lasers that I got to mess with. In fact, I still have my Green-Ne from there, that and a couple of HeNe heads, 5~10mW. They had two suites, one was our shop and sales floor, the other suite had our demo room where we pushed the Laserworks glavos (is Slewyn still selling those?) and the shop was used for storage.

The funniest thing I saw in the place was a control console for a 1KW CO2 etching system. On the side of this console was a sticker made by the company that used to use this laser. It read: "Warning, do not LASER anything but metal". Good times. The head for this laser, if I am not mistaken, weigh several tons and had 8 tubes stacked and the beam was a folded path. I know CO2s have a huge bore, but that must have been a BITCH to align. Very interesting.

Working there, I also found out, the hard way, after you power down a HeNe laser, it works like a capacitor, and a charge is still hanging out in the tube. Yeah, that was shocking! (pun intended). After that, I always shorted the Aldens with a screwdriver before boxing up the laser!

I miss it!

[mixedgas]

A few years ago I got invited to visit this um, place. Utterly boring when you walked through it. Just another late 1950s, early 1960s structure with tile floors and tiled walls. Not much was left there.

A silent, unmarked demo, from the long ago past, setting on a shelf, was a very long, custom cast, polished, clear block of something very tough to work with, and hydrocarbon in composition. It had several holes drilled from one end to the other, longways about a inch in diameter. No trepanning, no burn marks, no discoloration, no scratches inside the holes.

When asked, not by me, I knew what it was, our tour guide merely smiled.

The exercise and proof of what that means, is left to the student, as the textbooks say.

Due to a career change, made by economic forces, I doubt I will ever see such a place again...

Steve

[JohnYayas]

No idea what you are talking about. Anyway, although not the weirdest, one of the more historiacal places I have worked (or at leasted visited due to work) is one of the facilities in California where the Saturn rockets were designed and built. The buildings and people were still there... the rockets long gone.

[steve-o]

oops- didnt see page 2..had to delete my post to read further .. lol ..

[mixedgas]

No idea what you are talking about. Anyway, although not the weirdest, one of the more historiacal places I have worked (or at leasted visited due to work) is one of the facilities in California where the Saturn rockets were designed and built. The buildings and people were still there... the rockets long gone.

John, You'd have to have used/seen/ran tests on a big industrial laser to understand what I was speaking of.
The standard test to see how good your beam is, is called "mode burning". You aim the raw beam at a block of plexiglas.
The hotter spots of the beam burn deeper, leaving a unique pattern.

Lasers do not drill straight holes, they are nearly always tapered, known as "trepanning".

That implies what I saw was something rather unique.

Steve

[Solonar]

In the 80's I worked at Melles Griot making HeNe's. In the 90's I was using CO2 lasers to cut ceramic materials for microelectronics(I remember using the plexi plates to set the ideal beam profiles) and used Yag's for etching circuits into coated ceramic.
In the 00's I worked at computer refurbishing and Phonebook distribution.

Now I work in the Medical device industry working with thousands of gallons of Human and Goat blood.

[Yag]

I once worked in Teletubby land for a week.

[dar303]

I once worked in Teletubby land for a week.

I too used to take drugs, OD:ing is a bitch!

Sorry, couldn't resist!

[platinum]

When I used to balance HVAC systems, we were assigned the Clark County Death Center here in Vancouver, Washington.

All I can say is that place smelled like death and vanilla, neither a preferred scent to me. -Oh and they had InSinkErators at the low points of the stainless steel examination tables. I won't go into details in regards to what I was trying to point out to my coworker in the one I happened to shine my flashlight in. (This particular facility was for murders and mysterious deaths, of course.)

Happy Halloween!

- Jonathan