When you can’t grab more real estate, you make more room in the lab. Four physicists move two optical tables, and nobody gets injured. Who’d have thunk it?

Officially, not really. This is all a gag, a spoof, a put-upon, since somebody, somewhere might frown upon the kind of do-it-yourself attitude of four unsupervised physicists playing with heavy equipment. So here’s what did not happen:

Our bundles of joy need to be placed where there is sufficient overhead space for assembly, and that meant some reshuffling of the lab, and that meant moving optics tables. Big, heavy brutes. Fortunately we discovered that the heavier one had casters built in to the legs, and were able to move it quite easily. Only a few hours of bundling up cables to make sure we didn’t overtension anything, and that table only had to be moved a few feet, so many of the cables stayed in place.

Moving the second table was a lot more involved. Many more cables, more things in adjacent racks that we didn’t want to power down, and some twists and turns to get it to its new home. Several more hours of moving equipment, labeling and disconnecting cables, and crawling under the table to unravel years of accumulated tangling, which also required battle with the dust rhinos that had taken up residence in the cable mess. Unfortunately I was armed only with a cursed dustbuster (-2 on the damage roll) — the battery is almost completely gone and you could hear the device winding down after it had been running only about ten seconds. Quite pathetic. It went through many recharging iterations.

To lift and move the table we had acquired several transmission jacks that turned out to rise far enough to meet the bottom of the table but not actually lift it off the floor (the one that had been previously tested apparently had an extra half-inch of play, so as to fool us into complacency. You magnificent bastard!) so we had to go scrounging for some shim material. We eventually scavenged several 2″ x 2″ pieces of wood, which was a good thickness, but they were too long — we’d never navigate around the corners — so we had to cut them down. Physics labs and machine shops don’t cut wood all that often, but it turns out we did have a Skil saw … and the battery was dead. Not to worry, since the spare was sitting in its recharger. Which was unplugged.

It turns out that a colleague had a few boxes of his personal stuff locally accessible, and this included a cost-me-a-dollar-at-a-garage-sale bow saw that you might take with you camping. So we were able to trim the wood and use it to shim the jacks. After much grunting and several frantic shouts of, “STOP!” (we had zero spare clearance at a couple of points) we were able to shoehorn the table into its new space. No harm, no foul.

There is no photographic evidence of the move, if it indeed happened. I could be making all this up. The tables were always where they are now, and those indentations in the floors shaped like optics-table legs could really be from UFOs.