So the funny part about waiting a few days to update your blog is that you start to forget things that you wanted to write about. The really awesome part is that almost none of you are in a position to call me out for forgetting something or flatout making stuff up.
How was my weekend? Oh, the usual.
So I'll start with the pool party/dinner hosted by John Malone, which was a fantastic night out. In case he happens to be reading this, I would like to take the opportunity to thank you again for your hospitality. Among those in attendance were the freshmen; Lauren West and Erin Hub, the sophomores; Zach Gilfus, Wes Yland, Alex Hanford, and Matt Gianforcaro, and the usual crew of Elli, Sam, and myself. I also got a chance to meet Michelle Adam 97', who was, in a word, completely awesome. Contrary to what one would think about a party hosted by engineers for engineers, eye contact was almost made on several occasions and something other than boats was mentioned at least once.
"It's been like a whole paragraph since the last funny picture. I don't know if I'm going to make it."
So, on to the other activities that followed this weekend. The big news, as I may have mentioned earlier, was the inclining experiment for the MLP. This is the event that has made me so averse to certain quadrilaterals that I don't like to refer to them by name any more.
Muuuuuch better.
So for those of you that don't know much about boats, an inclining experiment is basically how the engineers find out whether or not they were right about, y'know, the entire ship's stability. The way this is accomplished is a bunch of weight is moved back and forth around the ship to make it tilt, and from there you can figure out how close the calculated stability made in Imaginary Engineer Land compares to the thousands of tons of steel floating in the harbor.
The trick is to make it tilt slightly.
There are a lot of different ways you can make the ship tilt for the experiment, but it boils down to "let's move some heavy stuff around." For reasonably-sized ships, this is accomplished by moving barrels or even moving giant steel blocks around with a crane. Physics, that fickle mistress, decided that these were way too sane to use on our ship, however. In our case, the only possible way to generate enough weight to tilt the ship was to move ballast around between tanks. In order to measure how much water was being moved, teams of people needed to hang out inside said ballast tanks while hundreds of tons of water is pumped in to measure ts depth.
"But who would be stupid enough to....OH HEY INTERNS! WE FOUND A JOB FOR YOU!"
To recap in English, it became my job to hang out in a giant metal room with no lights while unfathomable amounts of water get pumped in. If this sounds familiar, it's because you've probably watched a few James Bond movies. Contrary to what a reasonable human being would say about this situation, I thought it was the coolest thing ever and I was pretty pumped (get it?) to be doing the job.
Anyway, Saturday was the Big Day, and our shift started at 1800. Elli and I decided that it would be a good idea to use a Car2Go as our method of transportation to and from the shipyard, since it was our best chance of having a ride back after 1:00 AM, when our shift ended.
Plan B was a little less thought-out.
The cool part about Car2Go is that you pick up a car on the street, drive it wherever you want, then just park is somewhere when you're done and it's eventually retrieved. The absolutely awful part is that they use Smart Cars, and they are incapable of propelling me past 50 mph on a highway. I've attached a video of our trip.
We eventually got there alive, with a few minutes to spare before we were considered late for the incline. I find a place to park, and go to end my rental of the car outside the shipyard. It is now that I learn that the car is currently outside of the "home area," where I am allowed to end rentals and leave the car. Instead, my only option is to now park the car, tell it I'll be back later, and continue paying for the service. It is $15 an hour. I make $13. As you can tell, my night was off to a rip-roaring start.
It's the lack of a gas tank that makes this fire impressive.
Boarding was eventually accomplished, albeit a few minutes late. The experiment itself went off relatively flawlessly, and I don't have too many funny stories about the shenanigans that occurred on board. It was ultimately a lot of fun, and made me completely forget about how badly I hated everything associated with Smart Cars for a while.
But it eventually came time to go home, and we tried to use the onboard GPS to get us home. My car, best buddies as we were, decided that it would be a funny joke to have me drive back and forth along I-5 at 2:30 in the morning. Apparently we were going to play a game of NASCAR.
We participated in this race, and lost.
We eventually got home, thanks in absolutely no part to the car or GPS. That's all for now folks, moar to follow later.
I just need to look at this every so often to feel better.
