1204 Static

Thursday, April 12, 2007

I’ve got a static electricity problem.

I think I’ve always had it. I build up a powerful charge just walking around.

Back when watches were stem-wound, and then self-winding, a watch never kept decent time on my wrist. Left on the dresser or in my purse it was fine, but on me, they just didn’t work. Jewelers said I was “magnetic”.

I started working for The Company in 1968, in Kingston. Computers were huge then, and kept on raised floors in climate-controlled rooms. The rooms were kept at a constant humidity because the systems were very sensitive to static electricity. Static electricity could cause a “machine check”, a major error in main storage. Each central processing unit (CPU) was surrounded by tape drives (those tall things you see representing computers in old movies) and banks of waist-high disk drives. When a CPU machine checked, all its tape drives unloaded simultaneously, and the arms of all the disk drives slammed back, rocking the banks of drives. It was an awful KA-CHUNK! sound. Loud. Followed by eerie silence.

My job entailed large amounts of time out there on the raised floor. Every time I went to the machine room, at least one machine crashed. Sometimes my progress through the room was announced by a series of KA-CHUNK!, KA-CHUNK!, KA-CHUNK! as I passed the machines. I didn’t have to touch them. If I got within eight feet of them, they went down.

It took the operators a few weeks to figure out I was causing it, because it wasn’t consistent and frankly didn‘t make sense. They turned me over to the engineers. Back then, I wore nylon stockings and nylon slips. My hair was thick, long, and loose. They made me spray everything I wore with a static guard, and dampen and tie up my hair, and if that didn‘t work, they were going to have to transfer me from programming to publications. (For a while, they actually had me trailing aluminum foil from the back of my shoe!)

Luckily, it worked. As long as I didn’t touch the paper in the operator’s console, anyway.

Then we got some new machines, the latest technology, the next model. They were supposedly also less sensitive. As a test floor, we got the first two machines off the line. Each machine manufactured got a unique model number, so it could be tracked during its life, and we got 000001 and 000002.

It just so happened that I was carrying on a mutual flirtation with the 2nd shift operator on 000002.

Every time I got anywhere near 000002, it crashed. The joke was that it recognized me and was jealous.

Fast forward two years. I’m now a Company rep at a large chemical company in St. Louis. The customer is excited because they are upgrading to the newly released technology. The new machine arrives and is installed over the weekend. The customer programming manager invites me down to the raised floor to show off his new baby.

I walk into the room on Monday afternoon, and hear ………….. KA-CHUNK! Followed by an eerie silence.

I turned to one of The Company field engineers, who had installed the machine, and said through the stunned silence of the FE and the programming manager, “I bet I can tell you the serial number on that machine.”

I was right.

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I’m beginning to wonder if the serial number on my laptop might be 000002. Maybe some component deep inside is made of a bit of metal recycled from my old nemesis.

When I walk into the room and touch it, I get a shock. Always, every time. There’s a flash of light jumping between us. I’m sure it’s me generating the charge, because after that there’s no more, as long as I don’t get up and walk around. If I go out to the kitchen, when I come back I get another shock.

Jay used to ground himself when he walked into the computer room by touching a screw on the light switch. I tried that, and it’s not working for me. The only thing I can find that seems to work is the flatscreen monitor on the desktop PC, so now I touch that before touching the laptop. (Everything else on the desktop machine is plastic, so except for the monitor, which I rarely touched, static had not been a problem.)

I’m afraid I’m going to hurt the laptop, or in my efforts to avoid shocking the laptop, I’ll hurt the desktop monitor. (It’s a real fear. Back in about 1996 Jay had received an early prototype of a Blackberry-type thingy, to give to me for testing, on the theory that I can break anything. One day I touched the screen, and it went ZZZAAAAAAAP-POP, and it never recovered.)

Suggestions? Any way I can ground me or the laptop?
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