2005-02-04 - 7:45 p.m.
They've recently replaced the rather decrepit bank machine on the corner near my work with a shiny new model with a colour monitor and various new bells and whistles, including, for reasons none of us can figure out, the loudest volume setting any of us have ever heard.
It's so loud that if you sit in the coffee shop across the street and watch it for a while, you'll regularly see people putting their card in and then leaping back in terrible alarm as they try to type in their PIN number and every key-stroke produces a high-pitched shriek that registers at a level somewhere just below the sound-barrier. It's alarming even if you know what to expect - in self-defence your brain goes into instant total denial that anything could possibly have been that loud, so every new beep is almost as alarming as the first, and the series of continuous beeps that it emits at the end to remind you to take your card is so panic-inducing that you can see people taking to their heels with their cards, cash, and wallets still clutched perilously in their hands, hand-bags hanging open, they're so eager to get away from the terrible noise.
The last couple of weeks at work have been a crash course in decontamination and spill control equipment for me. I now know what the difference is between a boom and a berm is, the difference between an N95 and N100 respirator, an APR and a PAPR, a pancake probe and a scintillating probe. Though my favourite thing has been the slogans of teh various companies that make this stuff. Some are OK - "A passion to protect" seems appropriate enough for a company making chemical splash suits. Some are so obscure that they're clearly designed to drive away anyone who is not actually in the field -"Provider of leading edge technolgies based on mass spectrometry in a post-genomic world!" - some are vaguely paranoia-inducing - "Monitoring the world around us since 1896!" (from a company that makes radiation monitors, which makes me wonder precisely what they were monitoring in 1896), and others... I'm still laughing at the chemical spill control company that proclaims "Over a Billion Gallons Contained!", not to mention the product "GearReNew!", which is meant to deodorize sweaty tactical gear... Plus I accidentally stumbled on a site entirely devoted to firefighter tattoos, which enlivened a day otherwise filled with compiling tedious lists of equipment.
