Panning For a Fortune

How much gold is there in a flake?  Or, how many flakes in an ounce?

Let me do some math here. 7, almost 8, years at this job.  5 years at the previous job and 5 years at the job before that.  It was midway through that 5 year job that I was sent out to Denver to do some magic on a network that was being balky. Call it 15-16 years ago and that’s when I drove out of town and stopped to pan for gold.

This was back in the days when some networks had coax cables and barrel adapters and you had to close off all cable ends with resistors.  We were using IBM PCs with micro channel cards, remember those, kids?  The company’s unit with the problem was down the street from the old Denver airport, and the airport had just recently closed.  In fact, there was going to be an auction while I was in town that I considered going to, until I remembered that I couldn’t check an airplane tug into my carryon luggage.

The fix probably took me less than an hour, it was just a matter of disconecting sections of the cabling until the collision light on the hub stopped blinking and then walking that section of cable until doing the same thing, waiting for the same result.  I know that I took a bit of extra time to show the maintenance man what I was doing so he could either do it himself the next time, or have some idea of what he needed to do when I walked him through the process on the phone.

And for this, I flew five hours.  Each way.

With so little time dedicated to fixing the problem, I had plenty of time driving west toward the casinos.  I suppose the casinos were in the next county.  Along the way I past several "pan for gold" setups along the creeks.  I think it cost $5 and I don’t remember if that bought a certain number of pans of dirt or a certain amount of time.  In either case, I put down my money and swished my pan until I was able to pick up several small flakes with my finger–use a dry finger and the gold sticks right away.

What made me remember this long-short trip was that I was going through the nightstand, looking for a Schaeffer pen refill and I came across the small vial with the flakes in water and a small bag of "pan for gold at home" dirt.  I’m thinking that it could be worth my while to pan out this dirt and maybe hit the motherlode!  Or the bottom of the bag.

I wonder what a flake of gold is worth and how many flakes make an ounce.

Ender is out