Standardized Fittings

Here’s a party story I tell. Note that, like many of my favorite stories, it actively invites the listener to decide if I am making fun of myself, or if I’m an arrogant prig who hates all other people. I always come down on the side of “I like to make fun of myself” in such debates. Virtually all of the rest of humanity insists that, no, actually, I’m an arrogant prig. I try to rationalize that disconnect with this observation: "If my stories don't make it seem like I’m making fun of myself -- if they seem to be serious -- then the only logical conclusion is that the rest of humanity is doomed." I say that anyone who decides to come down agreeing with something like that is over-thinking things and isn’t considering many obvious exceptions. One such obvious exception is that humanity has not yet been successfully doomed.

Here’s the story. I tell it to people who hear my job description and say, “Wow, that’s a lot of responsibility for a guy who think ‘personal fashion’ should be interpreted literally!” (Ok, maybe that’s not exactly what they say.)

One noteworthy decision I made as a chemical engineer involved shooting an idea out of the sky. I was approached by a shift supervisor and two chemical operators with a proposal designed to cut down on wasted time and save money. The idea was to standardize our connectors for gas transfers to operate equipment.

Yes, I will explain what that means. My building has three types of gas piped into the process bays.
1) Pure Nitrogen. It is used to create a non-flammable environment over reactors full of flammable chemicals. It stops fires. We like that.
2) Instrument air. It’s the same stuff that we breathe, but it’s at very high pressures. We use it to provide non-electrical power to equipment we don’t want to plug in. We use it to power industrial pumps in process bays where electricity is an invitation to start fires.
3) Breathing air. We hook this stuff up to operator’s respirators. The operator then breathes it in when the area they are entering is especially hazardous. It is literally breathing air pushed in from a room upstairs.

All three of these lines connect to hoses via different connections. You cannot force-fit a connection from one system onto an incompatible piece of equipment.

The idea I shot down was this: The group approached me and suggested we move from three types of fittings to one. That way, we could simplify our ordering process and prevent people from having to search around for special fittings when something broke. It would also allow us to solve a problem we had where the instrument air in an area broke. We could have just hooked up the (high pressure) Nitrogen to the pump and used it until the instrument air pipe was repaired. (Note: Technically, there is a way that very-specific suggestion could work, but even that one special suggestion is a bad idea for several boring reasons.)

I turned the question around and dared the group to think of two reasons why moving to a standard fitting for those three systems would be a very bad idea. No one could think of any.

The punch line is that “I’m the guy who makes sure people trying to breathe Nitrogen or high-pressure instrument air can’t.” It’s the sort of story that works best on cold-sober people. Then again, most of my stories are like that.