Mark Rober designed an enormous Nerf gun to win an workplace Nerf battle. He talks to NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro about how he designed it, and what occurs once you get hit with a pool noodle at 40 mph.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
Jim Halpert, workplace prankster extraordinaire from the TV present "The Workplace," can be very, very pleased with our subsequent visitor. He is a mechanical engineer who works at an enormous Silicon Valley tech firm, and he designed and constructed - and you could ask why - an enormous Nerf gun within the hopes of one-upping his coworkers in an workplace Nerf gun battle. This apparently does occur at his workplace. Mark Rober joins us on the road from California. Thanks for being with us.
MARK ROBER: Good to be right here.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: OK, you may have pulled any variety of pranks in your coworkers. Clarify the Nerf gun.
ROBER: (Laughter) Yeah. So mainly, you realize, the primary day on the job you get there and also you understand all people has a Nerf gun. That they had, you realize, the smaller ones that shoot the darts. So a part of the ceremony of passage of coming to the corporate is you must get your personal. And so that you had these wars, nevertheless it quickly turned the place, you realize, somebody acquired the largest one. And we're all engineers, so any individual modified his to have, like, a high-strength spring loaded actuator inside so it shot actually exhausting.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So it was like a Nerf gun arms race.
ROBER: Yeah, precisely. It was precisely an arms race. So I believe the best way you win the arms race is simply get the bunker buster, proper? Simply go utterly to at least one excessive. So I constructed a six-foot Nerf gun that shoots these darts which might be fabricated from pool noodles because the shaft after which, like, a bathroom plunger because the suction. It shoots them 40 miles an hour about 50 yards. In order that, if...
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That sounds harmful. I wager you no person was going to mess with you after that, proper?
ROBER: Yeah. Darts typically flew much less in my route after I type of flexed my engineering prowess and muscle tissue.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: In most workplace cultures, initially, there's not Nerf gun wars. And secondly, how do you've gotten the time to, like, engineer a large Nerf gun? These are questions when the story got here up that have been flying round. We wish to know the reply to these questions.
ROBER: Yeah, so I've, like, a YouTube channel the place I type of use my engineering background to make type of ridiculous issues. So this appeared like type of an ideal match, two birds with one stone sort of factor. And as - humorous sufficient, it truly turned - so I've all the time wished to be a Guinness world report holder. And imagine it or not, earlier than I made this there was not a class for world's largest Nerf gun, however there may be now.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That's such a shock (laughter).
ROBER: Sure (laughter). And I'm the holder, no less than for the second. Till possibly my coworker makes a six-and-a-half-foot Nerf gun, I am the proud holder of a world report.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Mark Rober, mechanical engineer. He designed a Nerf gun that's now within the Guinness Guide of World Data for world's largest Nerf gun. Thanks for being with us.
ROBER: Thanks.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Glad you do not work in my workplace. Bye.
(LAUGHTER)
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