Our new county commissioner sent out a letter informing the volunteer fire departments that we’d have to submit a 2009 budget for this past year, a 2010 budget for the upcoming year, and a full asset register (i.e., inventory) in order to receive 2010 funds from the county. These traditionally amount to $4500, which isn’t a whole lot.

I suspect I may be in the minority (I’d bet the other fire departments are screaming) but we run a tight ship anyway, and I was rather pleased to see accountability required. It’s a great opportunity to know what we have and what we’re worth, and to constantly be vigilant that what we have doesn’t become what we can’t find. One fire department here found out the hard way what happens when you aren’t watching things.

We have a great treasurer who is handling the budget end with his meticulous records of purchases in the past several years. That leaves the inventory.

The inventory template required serial/part numbers, item description, quantity and $value, and what I determined to be the most indicative requirement, location. We have five locations for equipment: our three trucks: the pumper, tanker, and knocker; and the station, and issued equipment.

Over the past week, I dabbled in an initial rough draft of categories and items. I listed my recollection of groups of items within each category - a trip down memory lane as I mentally opened each compartment of the trucks and mentally peeped into each corner of the station to locate items. (I sat at home at the computer while I did this. It’s a zen thing.) I came up with five excel sheets based on location that we could work with, populated them with every item type I could recollect, and printed them out, one for each group of my soon to be victims, for I was not about to do this all by myself.

Occasionally we use training for building/truck maintenance, and this was a good opportunity to take advantage of seven smart people to do just about all the inventory in 2-3 hours. The $value still have to be assigned, and the station isn’t quite complete, but we’re 90% done. Lots of stuff was added to my rough excel sheets, I’d guess items are going to number between 500 and 1000, and I probably shouldn’t project the final total value here. It’s high. You wouldn’t *believe* how much some of this stuff costs.

One problem was the assignment of serial numbers, which most of our equipment does not have. I chose a pretty simple system that identified the item category and its location. PC-10 meant a Coupling on the Pumper, in this case a 6" Storz to 5" regular male adapter. KT-18 was a Knocker Tool - in this case a Mcleod digging/raking tool. Everyone understood it immediately and with the sharpies and pens that Glenn brought along labelled everything without problem.

It’s hard, though, to have to write on paper in a cool, increasingly humid late October night. For the occasion, Glenn purchased these wonderful cheap plastic clipboards, one for each group. Don’t they look good enough to eat?



Everyone loved them. But the reason I mention them is something that was worthy of some discussion - dig those edge effects! We noticed them under the station lights - the edges practically glow. Jim identified the plastic as acrylic, and suggested that it was a sort of fiber optic effect.

I looked a little more into it. The material is probably poly(methyl methacrylate), which goes by a lot of names like acrylic, perspex, lucite. Ordinarily it would be colorless and transparent, but in this case pigments have been added.

The glowing edge effect is well known to artists and hobbyists, since acrylic is extremely easy to work with with the tools you’d usually use to work with wood. The fibrous polymer seems to be reason for the edge effect - it intercepts light and transmits it in a fiber optic fashion to the edges. In fact, acrylic is often used to construct optical fibers for directing light. The brilliant tetris-like display at right is an assemblage of computer cases constructed out of acrylic, and illuminated by LEDs imbedded in the edges. No, the stacked cases don’t look anything like my bland computer case either. But now I’m thinking - what fun!

I tested the idea that it might be fluorescence, as some sellers claim. I viewed the clipboards in a dark room with an ultraviolet light. While there might be some, it’s not very intense and I don’t think explains the vivid glowing edges in a well lit room. Plus, the light emitted by fluorescence is usually light of a longer wavelength than that used to excite the material. I tested that with my green laser penlight. No, nothing other than green reflected/emitted from the yellow-green clipboard. From the pink clipboards there was an orange color emitted by shining the green laser on it, but it wasn’t very intense.

I was extremely disappointed with the purple clipboard. I had expected great things. It looks like the pigment is just too concentrated to give the effect. Nonetheless, it was a fun evening. As for the county commissioners, we’re going to knock their socks off with our inventory.

ADDED: Oops - forgot. From a previous post a couple of months ago, lamenting the passage of the faithful Margaritaville:



Not having examined it closely, I had just assumed this was a really and truly neon sign. Glenn pointed out that it was nothing more than this same edge effect: a pink acrylic lettering construct, backlit by a simple white light. Huh!