MasterBlaster said:
The coffee is maufactured synthetically in an old steel Mill Factory Blast Furnace. It is then shipped to our facility in a lead pipe. The lead pipe supply then enters the sludge separator to get rid of the "bad taste" where it is heated for our enjoyment.
- Bottoms up
Senior Deputy Associate Assistant Director said:
Sounds like the coffee at work... swept off the floor at the chemical plant...
Kona coffee. But I can't recognize good coffee anymore.
20 years ago, as a young watch officer, I was perched on my stool as the "Engineering Officer of the Watch" while the submarine conducted stowage checks. Also called "angles & dangles", it consisted of racing through the ocean at angles of up to +35 and -35 degrees. (The main engines were only warranted for 45 degrees, as were the inertial navigation computers, as well as our capability to recover from any nasty surprises.) By the time you got to the 30s you knew what needed to be tightened down.
As I sat there, strapped into my seatbelt and leaning back, watching the three watchstanders and their panels, I was right up against the auxiliary circuit breakers that formed the back wall of our space. Each breaker was about a cubic foot, rated at up to 75 amps, and filled with exotic safety features & trip mechanisms. There were 30 of them in a 5x6 stack. They controlled various pumps & motors that weren't considered to be life-support equipment but whose loss would make your day pretty miserable.
The breakers were also a couple feet forward of the starboard turbine generator. The front end of the turbine generator had a flat shelf on it that was just large enough for one of those mammoth 80-cup coffee pots. The rumor was that the coffee had been continuously brewing in this monster since the submarine had left shipyard ten years before. It was also surrounded by creamer & sugar, although real hairy-chested submariners wouldn't be caught adding that stuff to their Navy brew. Everything was strapped in tight and had survived previous stowage checks.
Until we achieved a 35 degree down angle. The pot had been filled to the rim with water (and grounds) for a fresh brew, and the watchstander hadn't considered that we'd be taking a huge angle that could dump a third of the pot over the top. The strap was also a bit low around the pot, and as the coffee spilled out past the lid, the entire pot tumbled free of its restraints and slammed into the wall of circuit breakers... where it dumped a fountain of hot liquid, mixed with creamer & sugar.
I felt the impact and looked down between my legs to see a black river (with creamy streaks) surging toward the Reactor Plant Control Panel. About the time I opened my mouth to comment on this strange phenomenon, the breakers started exploding. I was told that the fireballs lit up the engineroom like flashbulbs, but I was a little busy at that point dodging the fireball or two that came through the bulkhead behind me. I'm lucky I wasn't killed or electrocuted, although that might have been preferable to dealing with the aftermath of alarms, "minor" fires, destroyed electrical equipment, and losses of various pumps & motors. It was pretty exciting for the next 30 minutes. Luckily the reactor didn't scram, although we were all kinda twitchy for a few weeks. Talk about being hoist by your own petard.
Sugar fried in an electrical arc makes an amazing stench. It also adheres in a solid polymeric carmel mass to just about any surface and has to be chiseled off.
One of the scariest results was that the Lonmat flooring where the coffee had flowed was scalded so clean that it looked like the showroom sample. It lasted for months before fading to the same color as the surrounding deck. We used to joke about saving that coffeepot to produce more cleaning & polishing fluid for the rest of the decks, let alone for our intestinal tracts.
It took me a couple months to get back in the coffee habit. But whenever I smell coffee that's been brewing for a couple days, that memory is as fresh as the day it was created.
