There is a great classic movie, starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton, called “The Third Man.”
It takes place in Vienna, right after World War II, so there is an Allied occupation force in the city, and the people there are trying to get back on their feet.
Like any post-war ravaged area, the criminals and generally unsavory fellas swoop in to take advantage of the lack of law and order.
Joseph Cotton plays a novelist that has just arrived to visit his friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in Vienna. However, he is told that his friend Harry Lime has been killed.
As the novelist tries to unravel the story of what happened to his friend Harry Lime, he keeps discovering that there was this mysterious “third man” that was supposedly present at the scene of his friend’s “death.”
I won’t completely spoil it, as it’s a great classic movie and worth watching.
The point here is that we discover Harry Lime is one of those unsavory characters, although quite entertaining and funny.
He has been making a tidy profit through his criminal enterprises, but his bad deeds have finally caught up with him.
In the testing world, there are some key “war zones” to watch out for, to avoid being taken in by “Harry Limes.” I am not saying that there are labs out there with criminal and ill intent (although one lab in India copy and pasted all my precious website content into their own testing “reports” ha!), but these labs might oversell their capabilities and experience.
For instance, in the area of frac sand scrubbing, it’s important to work with a lab that has invested time and money in benchtop equipment. If not, your sand being tested will test at much lower crush strength than it is actually capable of.
This is because sand clusters, if not properly scrubbed, will blow up under crush stress and skew your crush results.
Also, when it comes to frac sand crushing, there is a great deal of experience and knowhow required to get consistent results. There are many sources of error in crush testing, for instance one big source is in loading the crush cell.
In testing parlance, you want both *precision* AND *accuracy* (yes, there’s a big diff).
To hire a lab without ANY “Harry Limes” on the payroll visit us here!
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