Spud Gun
Many years ago I temped in a flour mill on rolling shift basis 6am-2pm 2pm-10pm 10pm-6am with you changing each week. In truth it wasn't a bad job- it was warm, relatively well paid and I was treated as a human by my full time workmates. My job was to operate a flower bagging machine. This was a fabulous device that looked like a colaborative venture between Rube Goldberg and Nick Park. It took a flat packed bag, blew it open, filled it with flour, glued the top and checked it for metal before sending it off to a palletiser. All this was performed in a mass of gyrating whirly bits.

Alas, bagging orders of 200,000 bags did lead to boredom levels creeping up somewhat. The machine could be pre loaded with 1200 bags a time which led to 20 minutes where it essentially ran itself (it stopped if a bag blew up anyway). As such the full time employees' attention turned to the compressed air supply. This could pump hundreds of kilos of flour around the mill to various locations. It also had a outlet to allow flour that had been turned into bread making flour to be pumped back into a tanker. However if there wasn't any flour you could push a vast amount of compressed air into- well anything really.

One of the fulltime employees had decided to extend this to its logical conclusion by connecting a length of spare system pipe to the end of the flexi hose. Drop a baking potato into the tube, turn on local switch for the compressor and open the tap. The results were impressive.

Fired on a flat trajectory, the potato would smash a hole in the boundary fence and roll to a pulpy stop about 50 metres on. Fired at a 45 degree angle, the spud cannon would land a king edward on the railway station roof about half a mile distant. Experiments with football socks full of golf balls (an excellent anti zombie weapon), melons (generally sorbet by the time it left the muzzle) and of course bags of flour (double bagged these would land on the station roof with a satisfying white blast) and the weeks of my employment flew by. I have never since worked at a company that had produced such a spectacular time waster.

If I am honest my current job does not really allow for the sort of premier league arsing about that some of you have perfected. However as a recognised part of my job I got paid to make (and given the funding to produce) this;

i235.photobucket.com/albums/ee257/mampap_ungulate/Room1.jpg

(I've no idea how to actually make the image appear).

So essentially I've got a multichannel home cinema in a soundproofed room- some of the big amps can do planes taking off db levels. Blu Ray, PS3 and Sky HD are available as is stereo if you want. This is brilliant as actions carried out in this room are considered work.

Length? However long a sample evaluation takes baby.
(Leonard Hatred briefly did some work on, Thu 8 Jan 2009, 21:27, Reply)