16 May
2015
16 May
'15
3:27 p.m.
On 05/16/2015 02:50 PM, Billy Pettit wrote:
Chuck, I'll swap you for the time I was at CERN
working on 627 (one
inch) tape drives and some idiot rewound 24 of them at the same time.
It was a gag they pulled on new operators. It could take an hour
before you could hear people talk again.
Running the Navy Audit tests for COBOL had a "short record" test that
could get pretty loud, but I thought it was pretty cool, particularly if
you left the door down.
Shades of "Anchors Aweigh".... :)
What really got on my nerves, though, was the machine floor at SVLOPS.
You could have 6 or more machines on the same floor, high ceilings, and
cinderblock walls with no sound absorbing anywhere. Lots of white
noise, I think, mostly from the tape drive vacuum pumps. After about 4
or 5 hours, you could find yourself shaking. Eventually management
started distributing earplugs (the Sorbothane yellow spongy ones). That
helped a lot. You really did have to raise your voice quite a bit to be
heard by a the guy standing 3 feet away.
--Chuck