That Randall Munroe fellow and his comic #2553

Yep, he's done it again!  See also my previous post on Mr. Munroe's work from 2008, which also involved a writing style with dire portents, then commentary on some grammatical feature.  I just like that sort of thing!

I suspect that this kind of incident is quite rare in actual control rooms for nuclear power plants, which would be more the sort of place for Homer Simpson jokes.  The phrase "cool trick I learned" might sound geeky and oddly out-of-place, causing the other nuclear technicians to run for their lives on general principles.  But it's an amusing Gedankenexperiment.

Is this enough text to ensure wrap-around at the bottom of the cropped image?  Click through to see the original Monrovian artistic glory, brought to you no-extra-charge courtesy of The Internet.  If you find his work moving (see asteroid 4942 Munroe), he has coffee mugs and T-shirts for sale.  But seriously, it's quite far-fetched to imagine that the "Amazon package containing fireworks" would actually be placed under the control console, just to have set up this joke.