They told me it would work

First off, I must apologize for the length of time between postings. All I can say is that I have been busy and I will try to make up for it with an entertaining story about the CTO.

I was talking to the accountant at the Mecca last week. He's been around since the beginning. This is not the weasel accountant that does the SOX compliance, but rather the competent accountant that (thankfully) does payroll, administers the health plan, and generally does the things that actually make the company run. (If you can call it that.)

Anyway, the accountant threw out the comment that despite his wacky (unfeasible) ideas (that would have defied the laws of physics to actually work), there would be no company without the CTO. I think that I have to concede that point. He was one of the founders of the company. Of course the company's strongest skill is the ability to blow cash, so I am not sure that everybody would agree that the Mecca should have EVER existed in the first place. Regardless, it does, and I have another story of the engineering genius that is so prevalent at the Mecca.

Let us say that you have several thousand little holes that you want to dispense a very small amount of liquid into. There are basically two ways in which you can do it. The first way is to take a single needle (or a small number of independent needles) and dispense the liquid into the holes one (or a few) at a time. This is not a bad solution, provided you can fill each hole quickly enough. The other method is to dump the liquid into all of the holes at once. This has the advantage of being quick, but also the disadvantage of being much more difficult to control.

The original solution adopted by the Mecca (led by non other than Captain Fantastic) was the former. Unfortunately, he picked a machine that not only took too long to fill each hole, but couldn't do it reliably enough to fill several thousand of them. Of course that endeavor cost the company over a 1/4 million dollars, and wasted over a year while we tried to remedy the situation.

The CTO came to the rescue. I believe that his original project plan called for a solution inside of 8 or 10 weeks. This was a brand new device that was only a concept in his head. The concept was simple though, he would make a disposable array of several thousand capillaries, using the fabulous material that Captain Fantastic tried to make the sample holder from. Remember the photo-polymerized material that leaked and seemed to be incompatible with the sample? No bother, they told him that it would work.

Now a reasonable engineer would try to make an array of two, four, ten, or even 100 capillaries in order to test out the concept. Not the CTO. He knew this would work. He ordered the capillary arrays, and had his favorite engineer (a relatively competent guy, but prone to fits of sleeping in his cubicle) start on the rest of the machine. They hired a machine vision consultant to rig up a way to align the capillaries to the sample holder. It was all so simple.

Each capillary had a volume equal to the desired well volume. All you have to do is dip the array of capillaries into the sample, and it will pick up the liquid. The first miscalculation was that the space between the capillaries was roughly the same as the space inside of the capillaries. Of course that means that you will pick up lots of extra sample that will go pretty much anywhere, but where you actually want it. Apparently, this behavior was completely unanticipated and incomprehensible. Naturally, myself, the Sarcastic Brit, and the Mad Man from Down South were neither consulted nor welcome to offer our opinions on the matter.

No matter, they would dip the holder in mineral oil first and fill all of the capillaries. Then, they would use air pressure to blow the oil out of the "real" capillaries, and dip the array into the sample. From there, the sample would be ejected via an air stream and land in each of the holes in the sample carrier. It sounds easy. They missed a few things.

First of all, I remember making peashooters as a kid. Somebody had the bright idea to make a peashooter Gatling gun by taping a couple of dozen straws together and putting the peas in each. By blowing on all of them at once, you could pepper your victim with projectiles. It didn't work. You would get one or two peas out, and then no matter how hard you blew, all of the air would come out of the unblocked holes. Something about about pressure differentials and mumbo-jumbo that doesn't apply to the CTO of a company as grand as the Biotech Mecca.

Of course, this issue was brought up on many occasions, and always the CTO had "several ways to deal with it". Of course, they all involved differential air pressure and no way to block the empty capillaries and allow the others to see sufficient pressure to eject.

The other issue was one of the difficulty in making thousands of very small, perfect tubes using a bulk process. This meant that the tubes that did eject often missed the holes they were intended to fill.

The CTO chalked all of these problems up to the machine vision being too inaccurate. He brought the machine vision guy in again. I have no idea how much that guy charged, but we paid him as a consultant, and he worked full time at the mecca for six months. (So much for the 8 week project.) Strangely, each improvement in the vision system brought nearly no improvement in filling the holes with sample. A sane (or technically competent) person would have figured out by now that the problem was in the basic premise for how the thing was supposed to work. Not the CTO, he still felt that he was one machine vision miracle away from solving all of the Mecca's problems.

After nearly a year of wasting vast amounts of money, Swiper finally decided that the thing might not work, and that his CTO was merely wasting money and manpower. Did he scrap the project and get rid of the crap? No. We are paying to store it.

But, it does provide an amusing show and tell as part of the history of the Mecca. Unfortunately, new employees rarely believe the Sarcastic Brit or I when we tell all of these stories. It seems that it's too outrageous to be true.