Magic Smoke

[azurelunatic]

1. The Advance.

The Magic Smoke and I go way back, way waay back to when we still had the Plywood Pile¹ in the big house, and FatherSir brought home "the Advance" (so named by the kids because the most notable feature on this large industrial label-maker was a key marked "Advance"). I must have been about seven.

We loved to play with the Advance, and made cute little labels for just about everything. There are still some stuck to the drawers in the kitchen.

One evening, the Advance was plugged in, and I was looking in its direction, and suddenly I saw a curl of black smoke rising from it. I had a terror of fire, and I jumped up and down shrieking that the Advance was on fire! I remember that I was leaping well off the floor, and my heels were hitting my butt. I was too petrified to do anything but scream, but fortunately I was coherent.

FatherSir ran towards the smoking Advance, and unplugged it. I don't remember what else happened, but the Advance was largely in one piece afterwards. I was petrified of it for years afterward. I remember the smell distinctly, the fried plastic smell.



I can't remember the exact sequence of the next two incidents, but they were around the same time.

2. Cassandra.

One summer's day, I was home by myself, reading, and working on the computer (we had Guardian² at that time, and I spent a lot of time writing). It had become slightly stormy outside, but as this was Alaska, I was unconcerned. I was in the bathroom, attending to a slightly different summons of Nature, when there was a boom of thunder right overhead, and I saw blue sparks fly out of the outlet controlling the well circuit. I heard Cassandra³ shriek, and keep shrieking. I fled the bathroom, ran for the main breaker box in the pantry, and shut the house down with the master switch. Then I zoomed over to the computers, and shut everything down -- quickly. Then I turned off Cassandra, and waited for FatherSir to get home.

I got praised, of course, for doing it right, and FatherSir started everything back up again. Pretty soon, I started smelling that smell again, and we searched out the source. (I always get a nasty panic-feeling in my chest when I smell it. Conditioning.) Turned out to be Cassandra, who was quietly catching fire to herself, having been damaged by the lightning strike. Computers came down in one big fat OS-unsafe hurry, and Cassandra was taken offline until repairs could be made. (Which they were, and she screeches happily away to this day.)

FatherSir and I eventually concluded that the lightning bypassed the main breaker by striking the well instead of the power pole where it normally hits, and as the well is electrically connected to the house (plugged into the bathroom) and the bathroom is connected to the rest of the house, it's a good job we had Cassandra in the way of the power surge.

(And this, O Best-Beloveds, is why I'm so freakishly paranoid about taking Tigereye not only off wall power herself, but off all associated devices connected in any way to wall power, because I could just see unplugging everything but the network switch, and having her fry her Ethernet card because I was a shithead and forgot about that one.)

3. The Hysteresis Cannon.

This one, I do have a timeline on. It was the spring of 1998, and I was in Mr. Johnson's Electronics class in Hutchison Career Center when it was an annex of West Valley High School. This meant that high school students got to play with adult-quality learning tools.

Mr. Johnson had the class largely self-directed, which meant that most of us were working on building AM radios, Evil Steve was hacking the Mac in back, John and Evil Steve were building random fetishes out of spare electronics parts (metaphorge, if I still knew them, you and they would likely dig each other) and Geoff, my childhood playmate and the class genius, was building a hysteresis cannon⁴ with a few of the other students.

Now, you must understand what this thing does, if you don't already. Basically, there was a coil of wire at the bottom, and some aluminum poles sticking out of that, bundled, extending upwards.

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Electricity was applied, and the coil created an electric field. When a cylinder of aluminum (about 4" diameter, 2" high) was put over the poles when the power was off, and held down when the power was turned on, then let go, the thing would have magnetic currents induced in it as well, and it would shoot off most merrily, almost hitting the high classroom ceiling when the hysteresis cannon was set on one of the desks.

Mr. Johnson had stepped out for a little bit, leaving Geoff in charge of the class. (He was nominally in charge of the classroom in general, and I knew myself to be in charge of the electronics benches, as I was the most competent responsible one in that immediate area.) Someone was over at the desks playing with the cannon; I ignored it.

I snapped to, of course, when the hysteresis cannon clattered over, scattering rods, the guy who'd been playing with it yelled, "Oh, shit!" and scrammed, and a plume of white smoke smelling of burnt PCB (or same type of plastic) arose from the ruin. The electrical tape binding the rods together had heat-stretched. Naturally, Geoff and I ran towards the source of the disruption, rather than away. Geoff got there first and got it unplugged.

Everything was under control by the time Mr. Johnson got back, except for the lingering scent of scorched technology on the air.

4. The B: Drive.

I was in my Architecture and Operating Systems class, trying to add a second floppy to a machine. Sadly, I'd forgotten why the anti-static bag was provided us in the first place, and had a metal bit of the new disk drive touching the frame of the computer. So, when I plugged it in -- magic smoke. I cursed, dove for the power cord and master switch on the desk's power strip. Amazingly, I cut power fast enough so that the disk drive still functioned, when I plugged it in to check how bad the damage was...

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[1] My father built the house himself, and as such, we had various construction materials and tools lying around. A pile of plywood (I'm not sure what it was ultimately used for) wound up sitting in the house against the outer wall of the bathroom, and it was a handy platform for we the kids to sit on and play on. Stuff was also stored there. Also in the house were a radial arm saw and a tablesaw.

[2] Guardian was our 1994? Gateway 2000 computer, so named because in "The City on the Edge of Forever", the Guardian of Forever says, "Let me be your gateway." I was both whimsical and persistent, and the name stuck.

[3] Cassandra was our surge protector and uninterruptable power supply. She'd set off a screeching alarm when she wasn't getting enough juice, and since the computers were on the same circuit as the microwave, she shrieked every time the microwave started up, and she also shrieked every time our heavy-duty, high-volume laser printer (Asimov) started up. It got so we'd ignore her, so I dubbed her Cassandra, who was mythologically famous for being ignored...

[4] Several of my friends later told me that the other name for this device was a "railgun", which name I am sure Mr. Johnson avoided like the proverbial plague lest some innocent repeat it in front of Admin, or worse, a parent.

Comments

[kokuten.livejournal.com]

interesting connotation to A, B, and C...

The smell of Magic Smoke (I thought you were talking about pot!) Has _nothing_ on sheer stank quality compared to the smell of burning PCB.

Fry a component or two, smoke up a transformer, and it stinks.. burn a network card in the kitchen, and you just bought your buddy about 300$ of food to replace everything outside of the refrigerator, which you ruined, and spending the next week or so scrubbing and disinfunking.

Also germane to these, is that either of these smells is preferrable to the stench generated on the 3rd day of a 3 day lan party when the Gimp Member removes his fake leg for an ecstasy of scratching and non-leg-wearing.

[azurelunatic]

This is "magic smoke" in the context of the magic smoke that powers electronics components. If you let the magic smoke out, it doesn't work anymore, see? :-D

Whatever it was in any of the cases, it -- whewh.

I get a panic-reaction at any of the burning-plastic family of smells now...