How to Draw a Penis
Sep. 18th, 2006 12:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolThis morning I found myself at a small meeting at a prestigious local university. I have been retained as an engineering consultant to help this school revamp one of their laboratory buildings. In this meeting I was standing at the whiteboard discussing strategy.
One of the things we have to do in laboratory buildings is exhaust hazardous vapors and biologicals generated in chemical fume hoods, biosafety cabinets, chemical storage cabinets and other noxious places. We do this with a laboratory exhaust system that sucks all the bad air out of the building. We locate fans on the roof of the facility to blow this air out and away. We don't just dump the air on the roof, however; we create a high-velocity air jet that blows the bad air up hundreds of feet into the air where it creates a kind of plume. These effluents are then diluted by the atmosphere, and biologicals degenerate upon exposure to sun and the elements, and in this way the public health is protected. In cases where really bad stuff needs to be exhausted, the exhaust air stream is filtered before it leaves the building -- but this is done rarely, and in my opinion not nearly often enough.
In laboratories it is important that this exhaust system never stop working. If the exhaust fan were to break down, you would lose airflow through your chemical safety hoods, and then laboratory workers could be injured. We don't want this, so we build redundancy into systems. This means having multiple fans on systems, where if you lose one fan, another can start and keep things going.
So, at the whiteboard, I was describing the way this should be configured. I drew a cross-sectional elevation view of the roof of a building. I showed an exhaust stack standing atop this roof, a long tubular duct with a jet-inducing cone on the top pointing straight up. I then showed the fans that connect to this stack, two of them, one on either side of the stack, sitting on the roof, joining into the base of the stack.
I drew all this, patiently explaining the components and the reasons for their existence, and it suddenly dawned upon me that I had just drawn a very nice picture of a cock and balls on the whiteboard. The exhaust stack made a perfect erect phallus, and the rounded cowls of the exhaust fan volutes looked like a pair of swollen balls. I had even, for effect, drawn the effluent jetting out from the exhaust stack, making it look as if my phallus was shooting semen up into the stratosphere.
Because I am a neo-Victorian man, I found myself uncomfortable in the presence of this phallus that I had unconsciously made. I sneaked a peek at my audience. None of them were blushing or tittering, which meant either that they weren't seeing a phallus, or that they were professionals who had progressed beyond junior high mentality, unlike me. Nevertheless, I felt that something should be done that didn't involve leaving a big ejaculating cock and balls on the whiteboard of my client. I couldn't very well erase it, though, since I'd gone to all the trouble of putting it there. I therefore resolved that I should fix the problem by modifying my drawing, adding detail needlessly in an attempt to make it look less like genitals and more like an exhaust system.
This attempt failed. First I attempted to show the exhaust header punching up through the roof to feed the fan assembly, but when I looked at what I had drawn, this only looked like I had added in the prostate gland. Then I attempted to add in a sound attenuator section to the exhaust stack, but this only looked like I had wrapped my phallus in a condom. Finally I tried to add the stack guy wires and collar, which brace the tall exhaust stack from high winds that invariably blow in off the gulf, but once I had done, this looked to me only like some perverted bondage rig involving chaining one's pene to a wall, gimp-style. I was mortified.
"Nice job, Andy," said the project manager for the university. "We need to describe what we're looking at here to the campus architect so he knows what to expect. Go ahead and leave the drawing up on the whiteboard and we'll go over it in the next meeting. Thanks for all your help." I was ushered out.
Looking through the conference room window as I left, I saw my big swollen ejaculating fetish dong still gracing the whiteboard. There it will be evaluated by important decision-making persons from my biggest client -- people who I hope are less perverted than I am, or at least can see when a cigar is really just a cigar.
In hindsight I should have labelled the parts, or perhaps just put a large legend under the drawing reading, firmly: NOT A PENIS. It's too late for that now, though. I'm sure my creation will stay up all day until the cleaning crew comes in late at night, and then somebody who doesn't speak English will be shocked at the grafitti that crude, pampered university students leave on their classroom whiteboards.
One of the things we have to do in laboratory buildings is exhaust hazardous vapors and biologicals generated in chemical fume hoods, biosafety cabinets, chemical storage cabinets and other noxious places. We do this with a laboratory exhaust system that sucks all the bad air out of the building. We locate fans on the roof of the facility to blow this air out and away. We don't just dump the air on the roof, however; we create a high-velocity air jet that blows the bad air up hundreds of feet into the air where it creates a kind of plume. These effluents are then diluted by the atmosphere, and biologicals degenerate upon exposure to sun and the elements, and in this way the public health is protected. In cases where really bad stuff needs to be exhausted, the exhaust air stream is filtered before it leaves the building -- but this is done rarely, and in my opinion not nearly often enough.
In laboratories it is important that this exhaust system never stop working. If the exhaust fan were to break down, you would lose airflow through your chemical safety hoods, and then laboratory workers could be injured. We don't want this, so we build redundancy into systems. This means having multiple fans on systems, where if you lose one fan, another can start and keep things going.
So, at the whiteboard, I was describing the way this should be configured. I drew a cross-sectional elevation view of the roof of a building. I showed an exhaust stack standing atop this roof, a long tubular duct with a jet-inducing cone on the top pointing straight up. I then showed the fans that connect to this stack, two of them, one on either side of the stack, sitting on the roof, joining into the base of the stack.
I drew all this, patiently explaining the components and the reasons for their existence, and it suddenly dawned upon me that I had just drawn a very nice picture of a cock and balls on the whiteboard. The exhaust stack made a perfect erect phallus, and the rounded cowls of the exhaust fan volutes looked like a pair of swollen balls. I had even, for effect, drawn the effluent jetting out from the exhaust stack, making it look as if my phallus was shooting semen up into the stratosphere.
Because I am a neo-Victorian man, I found myself uncomfortable in the presence of this phallus that I had unconsciously made. I sneaked a peek at my audience. None of them were blushing or tittering, which meant either that they weren't seeing a phallus, or that they were professionals who had progressed beyond junior high mentality, unlike me. Nevertheless, I felt that something should be done that didn't involve leaving a big ejaculating cock and balls on the whiteboard of my client. I couldn't very well erase it, though, since I'd gone to all the trouble of putting it there. I therefore resolved that I should fix the problem by modifying my drawing, adding detail needlessly in an attempt to make it look less like genitals and more like an exhaust system.
This attempt failed. First I attempted to show the exhaust header punching up through the roof to feed the fan assembly, but when I looked at what I had drawn, this only looked like I had added in the prostate gland. Then I attempted to add in a sound attenuator section to the exhaust stack, but this only looked like I had wrapped my phallus in a condom. Finally I tried to add the stack guy wires and collar, which brace the tall exhaust stack from high winds that invariably blow in off the gulf, but once I had done, this looked to me only like some perverted bondage rig involving chaining one's pene to a wall, gimp-style. I was mortified.
"Nice job, Andy," said the project manager for the university. "We need to describe what we're looking at here to the campus architect so he knows what to expect. Go ahead and leave the drawing up on the whiteboard and we'll go over it in the next meeting. Thanks for all your help." I was ushered out.
Looking through the conference room window as I left, I saw my big swollen ejaculating fetish dong still gracing the whiteboard. There it will be evaluated by important decision-making persons from my biggest client -- people who I hope are less perverted than I am, or at least can see when a cigar is really just a cigar.
In hindsight I should have labelled the parts, or perhaps just put a large legend under the drawing reading, firmly: NOT A PENIS. It's too late for that now, though. I'm sure my creation will stay up all day until the cleaning crew comes in late at night, and then somebody who doesn't speak English will be shocked at the grafitti that crude, pampered university students leave on their classroom whiteboards.
