I may be posting more “overheard” stories in the near future; we’re in the phase where we’re assembling all of the parts we’ve been working on, more or less individually, so there’s a lot of team activity, which leads to a lot of chatter. Working alone leads to chatter, too, but that’s more cursing Microsoft or muttering about my own mistakes, usually in that order.

I had rearranged the power cords to segregate the modular ones which plug into equipment (i.e. NEMA M at one end, IEC F at the other) and the ones with exposed wires you could wire into a homemade box (or replace a permanent cord) and mentioned this in the hallway. One colleague termed those “power cords of death,” at which point another went all knifey-spooney, “That’s not a cord of death!”

From his lab:

Power cord of death: a power cord with prongs (i.e. male connectors) on both ends. It was apparently used to daisy-chain power strips together, where one had a bad cord on it. Since they’re just wired up in series, you can do this, but you run the risk of wiring a hot receptacle to another hot receptacle, at which point you might have fried grad student. And they don’t often smell good before frying, so that’s a bad thing™.

Son of power cord of death: this was a power cord, sans grounding plug (snipped off), wired into a cable with a BNC connector at the far end. Used to power a fan acting as a chopper in a vacuum system, and the only available vacuum feed-through was BNC. Proving the old adage that when all you have is a BNC feedthrough, all of your electrical problems look coaxial. (Also proving that most professors won’t spend money on new equipment if the old equipment can be kludged together to do the job)