So I've been digging a fresh part out of the CNC lathe, put my micrometer on it while I'm turning around, and look up... standing about a foot away is a guy who looks just like The Tall Man from the movie 'Phantasm' - an actor named Angus Scrimm, if you don't already know, six and half feet tall, two hundred years old, looks like Methuselah after opening a summons from the IRS. Dressed all in black. It was one of those loooong moments while we looked at each other. He had half a dozen similarly funereal, though not as striking, friends arrayed behind him.
JC, who owned the company, scurried up and introduced them, said he was giving them a tour of the plant. AGL had been one of the first companies to patent a use for lasers, back in the early '60s. They'd sold one of the very first ones to a group of Amish down in south Arkansas. They'd used it for twenty years (take *that*, you consumer electronics engineers!) before it broke, and they'd made arrangements to have it repaired while they were out our way.
I gave them the standard dog and pony show, used the micrometer to show them how ordinary tolerances were well within the size of a human hair (JC parted with the sample hair with ill grace), etc. The group moved on to another station.
I got the full story from JC a few days later. The Amish had been using the laser to set grades on their fields with the laser pickup mounted on a horse drawn plow. Apparently their elders had decided the laser was an acceptable substitute for the usual surveyor's instruments. JC gave them a new one; the (repaired) old one became a powerful sales tool.
Sometimes I have this vision of that new laser sitting on its tripod in one corner of a dusty field, its red beam glittering on the dust motes as a man trails a pair of horses, putting pressure on the plow just so while watching the reflective pickup attached to the blade...