NEW ORLEANS – After BP’s robotic submarine accidently popped the cap off their gushing oil well a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico two weeks ago, the world’s 6th largest oil company decided to give the cap another try on Monday.
With the cap securely in place, BP began tests on Tuesday to ensure the cap would stanch the mucky spillage, which, in the past three months, has sent an estimated 4.5 million barrels of oil bubbling to the ocean’s surface and fouling beaches from Florida to Texas .
And while it looked like BP had finally stopped the black gold bleeding, tests late yesterday afternoon determined the cap had been installed incorrectly, its threads reversed and “forced on” by BP engineers too embarrassed to return to the surface and admit they’d ordered the wrong cap. According to Neville Rothstein, a BP engineer who had hoped to remain nameless, “I wasn’t about to take the cap back to the surface [of the ocean]. My performance review is scheduled for next week. I stand to get a 3 percent raise. They find out I ordered the wrong cap and forced that sucker on, I’ll get 2 percent, tops.”
And to make matters worse, BP, which solely utilizes the metric system, tried to tighten its metric cap with a 25-foot American SAE wrench, badly stripping the Volkswagen-sized nut welded atop the cap.
“We’re screwed,” giggled Ian McDermott, BP’s Head of Metric Conversions, nervously. “Yes, that pun was intended. But, seriously, we’re…well…screwed.”
The plan was to have engineers shut down valves, then see if the cap could withhold the pressure and not pop like a 10-ton zit. But engineers have opted not to shut off the valves for fear the pressure will compound the problem, which could require BP to purchase even more WD-40. To date, engineers have sprayed over 60,000 cans on the cap, then tapped butter knives against its sides in the hopes of loosening it.
“Think pickle jar,” said McDermott. “A really big pickle jar. With thick, black pickle juice. But without the pickles, of course.”
If the WD-40 and butter knives don’t work, BP has plans to send down its robotic submarine to repeat what it inadvertently accomplished two weeks ago. According to Nigel Hawthorne, the engineer who steers the robot while seated in a gaming chair, a large joystick balanced on his lap: “If I could just remember how I screwed up the first time, that’d be great. I have this performance review coming up…”—Citizen Dick Arneson reporting
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