Wear Your Glasses Nermil

If there is one thing that was emphasized about dangerous work in my household growing up, it was the importance of eye protection. We had a machine tool in the garage, a World War II era aircraft parts manufacturing tool that had made parts to bomb Krauts. So there would be 6th grade Natey in the garage machining parts for this or that. Hundreds of hours on the machine tool and nothing ever went dangerously wrong. All those years of my old man espousing the benefits of lexan eyewear finally showed some dividends this week.
I had flown down to Sacramento and then driven to San Jose on Wednesday to do some battery work Thursday. Towards the end of the day I wanted to change out one of the interconnecting cables due to some bad copper corrosion where the chrome coating had worn off. I disconnected one end of the cable, and before I could get it insulated it slipped and shorted across ten 12V industrial sealed lead acid cells. With a giant bang and flash, slag went everywhere and the cables of two adjoining cells welded themselves to their posts. Luckily I was wearing my personal protective equipment, which I credit with saving my eyes.
I had to get all the destroyed batteries and cables removed from the system in order to restore the unit to service. This took several hours, which made a time crunch getting back to the airport to fly home. I made it to the airport in time to check my bags, but it turns out Southwest airlines had overbooked the flight by at least 10 tickets. So I hang around the terminal, only to be left behind by my flight. So I wound up renting a car and driving up Friday since every flight on every airline from the Bay Area to Portland was sold out until Sunday.
Good news is I get to fly to Spokane on the 4th of July to do more battery work! Yea!