"Mine involved a deep fryer.... For nine
excruciatingly long months, I worked at Long John Silvers. On the best
day it ever had,it was several notches below 'sucks'. Normally,it didn't rank
that high. But anyway, this particular one vented the exhaust gas from the
gas deep fryer and the fumes from the grease vats out the same
chimney. Bad idea. The grease coated the inside of the chimney, and yeah, ignited. It
looked like a captive rocket engine test. And it was at night! It lit up the
entire little strip mall. It more or less extinguished itself,but was quite
impressive. People were pulling over to watch. Imagine a 30 foot gusher
of flame and a fairly loud roar. No harm to the building really - scorched
paint is about all. But impressive!"
-- Scott Thomas
"Hmmm, difficult one... Perhaps when I was working security at a local hotel and there was a
noise complaint about the boys in the room above the callers' room - they said
they were bouncing their ball and jumping up and down on their beds.
At the time of the call, I had a sneaking suspicion, and found it verified
when I knocked on the offenders' door - and a woman in a definite
'condition' answered the door. Seems she was staying in the room next
door and was over to, ah, visit. The coolest thing? It was the look on her
face as I described the complaint from the room below. Words simply fail
to describe it."
-- Scott Lammers
"Define 'coolest'. Do you mean spectacles or what? Biggest spectacles at
a school are student injuries, usually caused by other students or by the
victim's own stupidity or ignorance. Not coolest. Coolest for me
was - while construction was finishing outside on the largest high-school football
stadium in the state - walking in and finding a lab with 25 computers which
have the same decent word-processing program, internet access, and
capability for two reading programs that I use. It takes so
little to make an English teacher happy."
-- Maria Bellamy
"Takes even less to make a college professor happy. This year, every
classroom I teach in actually has its own chalk!
Mind you, we bought some huge multimedia thing that was supposed to
display PowerPoint presentations, have a VCR, an overhead projector, and I don't
know what-all else. I went to the training for it - it only ran Mac disks
(all the faculty have IBM-compatibles) and was so big it wouldn't fit on the
elevator. So I'm really happy about the chalk!
But seriously, the day they hooked my PC up to the Ethernet cable for
constant Internet in my own office - that was the coolest!
-- Cathy Fiorello
"I suppose each person's definition of 'coolest' is different, but to
me, it's something impressive where no one gets hurt. Injuries are not the least
bit cool, tho' a high energy release can be. I saw a big transformer explode
with a brilliant purple flash and loud 60 cycle hum. I was outside after an
ice storm, at night. The reflections on the ice were truly amazing. The weight
of the ice had bent and shorted some unfused bus bars, making the transformer
very unhappy. No one was hurt, since the thing sat on a concrete pad a half
mile off the road and no where near a house. A coworker thought a possum had gotten in it, but a possum
wouldn't cause the transformer to commit hara-kiri. You'd just have vaporized possum. I
had to help clean a carbonized possum out of a 440 volt motor speed
controller once... What a stink, and every bit as gross as you can imagine. Since I
was the only one who could fit into the space where the speed controller was,
I got most of the job. Yuck. Life is weird at times."
-- Scott Thomas
"You mean like the time a kid brought some firecrackers to school? He lit
one, and just as he was about to throw it, a teacher walked by. So, in a
panic, he stuck it into his pocket. With the other firecrackers he had
brought. They all went off, and he went to the hospital. Think of it as evolution in action.
-- Carl Parlagreco
"I just remembered another 'coolest' thing I'd seen - one to actually beat
the first I mentioned. About six or more years ago, when we had that really nasty ice-storm that
dumped about four inches of freezing rain, I was working at the Hyatt and
one of the engineers took me up onto the roof to take a look-see. Except for
the very center of downtown (which had underground power) the entire city
was pitch-black and silent as a tomb. Every minute or so you'd see a
green, blue or purple flash and a few seconds later the rolling boom as
transformers exploded in a spectacular city-wide cascade failure. THAT
was really cool."
