Anyone ever screw up big time while working in the lab...

Get Your Med School Admissions Questions Answered!
This forum made possible through the generous support of SDN members, donors, and sponsors. Thank you.
ssquared said:
Nothing's worse than trying to catch loose mice. We had to wear jumpsuits, hairnets, face masks, gloves, and booties when working with the mice, so running after them was more like an exercise in waddling around, swearing at the little thing. "Gah! You !@$^$%@# mouse! Come back here!"

Always a good time. And if you're lucky, they'll bite you, too.
Click to expand...

yup, well, thats why i dropped it in the first place. nothing like learning to scruff mice and being afraid to get bitten to set you up for disaster. my shaky hands and sweaty gloves led to a loose grip and as soon as he went for my finger i freaked and dropped him. f*cker bounced so fast i didnt have time to get the lid down on the cage. and so there we were in our gowns and booties laying across the floor to stop it from going under any doors or immovable equipment. good times.

...and that's why i like guinea pigs SO much more than mice. they just sit there and scream, no matter what you try to do. (unless you hypnotize them first...totally hilarious).
Members don't see this ad.
 
One time we had a visiting professor bring a sample to the NMR lab that I was working for. She had traveled to our school for the specific intent of using our lab, and I was the specimen preparation tech.

I made up the sample, put it in the tube, and headed toward the instrument room which was in a different part of the building. On the way, I had to take a leak, so I stopped by the restroom. I set the sample tube on the counter, turned around to step toward the urinal, and then I hear "snap." The tube broke, and the sample sprayed all over the floor.

Fortunately she had brought more sample, otherwise I probably should have been canned. Nonetheless, considerable time elapsed before I was allowed to prepare another sample.
 
ssquared said:
I've got lots of stories of idiotic things that people have done, though. One of my favs is the girl at NIH two summers ago who got corneal burns because she didn't know that when visualizing your gels with UV light using eye protection is probably a good idea. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...


Did that. Hurts like hell.

My very first time ever examining a gel with an open UV source. The postdoc in the lab showed me how to jam a pipette tip into the safety auto-shutoff, and told me that if I was "pretty quick" I didn't need to wear the shield. He then gave me the razorblade and told me to have at it (I needed to cut out the bands to clean up the samples).

I thought I was "pretty quick" until about 2 hours later when I was in utter agony and nearly blind. I got lucky and they healed after a couple of weeks and my vision hasn't been too permanently affected. I have to wear sunglasses on summer days now, though.
 
Members don't see this ad :)
I managed To suck up my entire cellline that i had been passaging for about 2 weeks!
 
One of our PROFS once had toxic gases spewing out of the lab and all over the building! To top it off, this is an old building, so there are dorms in the same building as the chem/o-chem labs...talk about health hazard! Everyone had to be evacuated from the dorms for 5 days, lol. Imagine that!
 
I never screwed up in the lab... i don't do anything,anyway
 
Crazy4F1 said:
yup, well, thats why i dropped it in the first place. nothing like learning to scruff mice and being afraid to get bitten to set you up for disaster. my shaky hands and sweaty gloves led to a loose grip and as soon as he went for my finger i freaked and dropped him. f*cker bounced so fast i didnt have time to get the lid down on the cage. and so there we were in our gowns and booties laying across the floor to stop it from going under any doors or immovable equipment. good times.

...and that's why i like guinea pigs SO much more than mice. they just sit there and scream, no matter what you try to do. (unless you hypnotize them first...totally hilarious).
Click to expand...

I had exactly the same experience! The post-doc said, "Oh, it's so easy. You just take them out... like that! Why don't you try it?" I wasn't firm, saw it get into position for my finger, got cold feet and dropped it. The post-doc was so pissed! I also had a go with the cryostat in preparing brain slices (incidentally with the same post-doc). If I didn't tell you they were brain slices, you wouldn't recognize them. Crumpled up, torn apart slices... yeah...

My first heart perfusion on mice was a horrific experience... I was told to put the baby mice on ice for a few minutes, take them out, pin them, and start cutting up their chests. The first mouse was very hyperactive and wasn't fully anesthetized. So, when I started cutting, it started writhing in agony. I had to call my supervisor over to inject anesthesia and finish the procedure.

What else? I destroyed the placement wire for the microelectrode puller once. Had to call my PI down for an hour to fix it, and I was so embarrassed. (I've also broken hundreds of microelectrodes, but, unlike a previous undergrad who worked in my lab, I didn't chuck them across the room in frustration :laugh: )

In orgo lab, doing the lab practicals (counts for like 25 percent of your grade), I knocked my entire crystal sample down the sink in like the 2nd to last procedure.... Good times!!!!
 
New employee at hospital + grotesque incompetence + open urine sample + pneumatic tube.

Cost of HazMat having to dismantle and flush out the entire tube system of a major hospital = ~100k.

Coming back from your morning meeting to discover your lab had been sprayed with pee? Priceless

For the record, this wasn't me, but someone else who works on my floor (or did anyways). They had to shut down a substantial portion of the hospital and cancel some surgeries while HazMat came in to do their thing. No one was watching the new employee carefully and just assumed she knew how pneumatic tubes worked, so she put about a dozen samples through the tube before someone found out, and as you might imagine, open liquids do not do well in pneumatic tubes. No one had ever done it before, so no one was prepared for the huge array of problems this caused.

That make anyone feel better about their mistakes?;)
 
alisa said:
My first heart perfusion on mice was a horrific experience... I was told to put the baby mice on ice for a few minutes, take them out, pin them, and start cutting up their chests. The first mouse was very hyperactive and wasn't fully anesthetized. So, when I started cutting, it started writhing in agony. I had to call my supervisor over to inject anesthesia and finish the procedure.
Click to expand...


had a similar thing with the guinea pigs. i had the thing under enough ketamine to stun a moderately sized elephant and it started screaming when i went to start the procedure. talk about heart wrenching :(
 
I remember one time I was wearing flip flops in the lab, despite being told not to, and my PI was giving me dirty looks because of my (lack of) shoes. She was watching me doing some things when I managed to smash some glassware into a million pieces. She looked me at surrounded by broken glass and said calmly, "And that's why we wear closed-toed shoes."

And I'll never wear flip flops in the lab again.
 
i broke a mercury thermometer... after 2 other people broke theirs; which effectively forced the entire lab to evacuate the room to avoid mercury poisoning. oops.
 
PhillyMD2006 said:
Really? You must have been clenching them pretty hard. I have worked with mice for quite some time delivering doses through all kinds of methods and yet to kill one in my hands. Sedation and surgical procedures are a whole different story though.

Some of my favorite mouse stuff includes:
1. retro-orbital bleed/injection (about as fun as it sounds)
2. cardiac punctures
3. skin grafts (nothing funnier than a black mouse with a white patch of skin -- and vice versa)
Click to expand...

retro-orbital bleeding = disgusting :thumbdown:
 
Members don't see this ad :)
After reading these posts, I'm glad that my lab's model organism grows in a test tube on the shelf so I don't have to worry about beheading anything.

Most time wasting screw up I've made in lab: Created 6 Northern Blots at once, forgot to cross-link them before adding wash buffers. Lots of time and RNA down the drain.

Most bio-hazardous screw ups: 1) Senoir tech spilled a big stock bottle of Ethidium Bromide (DNA mutagen, carcinogenic) down the front of his shirt. 2) Other Tech missed getting phenol/chloroform (burns like a mother<bleep>er, carcinogenic) on his eyeball by 1/2 cm, other part of face not so lucky.
 
ssquared said:
Nothing's worse than trying to catch loose mice. We had to wear jumpsuits, hairnets, face masks, gloves, and booties when working with the mice, so running after them was more like an exercise in waddling around, swearing at the little thing. "Gah! You !@$^$%@# mouse! Come back here!"

Always a good time. And if you're lucky, they'll bite you, too.
Click to expand...

How about trying to catch a rat after she has received cocaine through a jugular catheter? Still not as bad as the meth rats...
 
Anjlprincezz said:
How about trying to catch a rat after she has received cocaine through a jugular catheter? Still not as bad as the meth rats...
Click to expand...

Sounds like a blast. Gotta love the drugs.

I've never worked with rats, though. They're a lot bigger than mice-that could be a pro or a con, I'm not sure which.
 
yeah i'm a walking disaster. and here i am trying to get into med-school.
last summer i was working in lab and i was using the UV-light visualizer: stuck the gel in, closed the box, turned the lights on, got my image on the computer, saved it, and i left lab. the next morning, i saw water coming out of every crack of the equipement. i realized that i had forgotten to turn the uv-light off. when i finally pressed off and opened the gel compartment, there literally was no gel left. what was left was this crinkled piece of plastic.
i didn't get in trouble or anything, thank god.
 
hmm...these are really funny. after 4 summers of lab work and 6 months postbac so far @ the NIH i thought id add my own.
well, there was the time i
1) tried to do a marathon 10 westerns at once. I added the running buffer to all the gels and all that protein went down the drain. Had to kill another six animals the next day and extract 12 new kidneys :( I felt so bad
2) spilled a tube of antibody all over my bench (brand new $700 antibody)
those were MY worst.

then there was the time back in summer 05 when our lab was doing a dietary study with KO mice (2 different KO plus WT really expensive batch of animals) and about 4 months into the study the VA animal tech "accidentally" fed our animals the wrong food essentially stopping the study 4 months into it. She claimed she didnt realize it was a dietary study and that they had to be fed the specific forumlations of food we provided, she just fed them all the same thing. not only did we have to re-order animals from jackson (costing upwards of 40,000 - NO JOKE), we had to basically sacrifice those and just forget about them, being that we didnt know which ones ate what for a period of about 1 month, for a DIETARY STUDY, they were all worthless to us. we harvested their hearts and arteries for a calcification study but that was it. In my life I had nevert seen my PI yell like that and he was in a bad mood for like another 3 wks. And hes a pretty chilld out guy...I wouldnt blame him...He was trying to extend an R01 grant and had no new data to show...that was probably the worst ever. The lab tech got fired.
once someone left the -80 freezer open overnight (didnt latch it properly). resulted loss of most samples. It was beeping all night i dont get why a janitor didnt have the brains to just shut it...whatever. no one ever fessed up so life just went on...
 
Broke some NMR tubes. Not too bad, but @ $7 a pop and broke a couple a day over 5 weeks, it can add up.
 
As a lab tech I supervised some volunteers my PI had "hired." So these mistakes aren't really mine, but in a sense, they are for letting them get by. We had one nightmare guy that completed a pretty fantastic hat trick. This guy had spent several years (!) working in a major biotech (that I won't name...) and had an undergraduate degree in science, so these aren't first day mistakes.

1. After coverslipping several slide boxes worth of stained tissue, he decided that they "looked wrong" so he finished the rest (several hundred slides) by putting the coverslip on the bottom side of the slide.

2. Instead of using the valve marked "Vac" in the cell culture hood as vacuum, used the one marked "Gas." Then he didn't notice that his aspirator blew instead of sucked. Then once he smelled gas, left it on as he walked around the lab asking other people if they smelled gas. After 20 mins culture room was totally full of gas and someone else figured it out. Fortunately, it didn't ignite.

3. This one is the best. We do some high-thoughput immunostaining, and one day in January our routine stains stopped working. We spent several thousand dollars on reagents, a month of time, and about 7 person-months of work before we traced the problem back to the PBS he had made for the lab. His lab notebook documented how he had made 40 liters (yes, liters) of buffer by using 40 mL of 1x buffer and adding 40 L of water. The pH was right on ... until you put something in it.

There's a valuable lesson here: if you're not positive about someone's competence, don't give them a task that affects things beyond their project. Even though it was a simple task, a stupid error touched everything in the lab. If I had given him a really hard project he would have wrecked it, but not everything else in the lab.

-CHO
 
In 10th grade, during chem lab, we were doing this experiment where we put a white powered into a crucible, heated it for half an hour over a burner, and measure the change in mass due to the oxygen in the powder escaping, or something like that.

My friend and I decided to take little bits of magnesium that we found on the chemical cart and stick them intro the crucible.

20 minutes later, our lab station exploded.
 
In undergrad ochem lab: We were during some sort of extraction using ether and all of a sudden the fume hood next to mine fills with flames, fumes were ignited by the hot plate, she screamed, our TA just laughed until the TA next door came over to help out.

In undergrad research lab we worked with rats and beheading was just about the worst thing I've done. I'd also perform some of the ovx surgeries and of course stabbed myself with my ketamine needle, luckily before I had used it on the rat.
 
When I started reading this thread, I thought, "Ye Gods--& these people are going to be doctors..." but honestly, it's just too funny and of course, how else do we learn the really important lessons but by our mistakes?

Btw, a friend's son took down the whole Eastern seaboard network of a major company a couple years back when he downloaded a virus on a personal e-mail--first job out of college and he was, of course, summarily fired.

Thanks for the entertainment this evening and keep 'em coming!:laugh: :laugh: :laugh:
 
ssquared said:
You gotta make sure it has some kick left in it. :laugh:
Click to expand...

Maybe I just like pain or something but you get used to the little "jolt"....but for some reason I can't get anyone else to try it....... :rolleyes:


Back on topic: Let's hear some more stories, definitely one of the funnier threads on here. I've been cracking up while reading some of these mishaps so I'm sure my wife thinks I'm a little nuts about now, tried to explain some of them but she just kinda looks at me strangely, lol.
 
The trifecta: Convincing lab partner that dropping magnesium strips into the heating crucible is "just like a 4th of July sparkler" and will be fun. Said magnesium exploding in a blinding puff of light and hastily dropping heated crucible into the cold water bath to "put out the fire". Crucible explodes, startling nearby bench partner who knocks over her entire distillation setup, thereby dumping steaming crap all over our TA. TA is not pleased.

I still can't believe how you guys are breaking so many HPLC goodies. The Shimadzu at my lab should have training wheels for all the crap i've put it through. Sometimes when i'm really bored, i'll run anything I can dissolve through the column and try and guess retention times. Hey, it's science.
 
not exactly a faux pas of mine..but i'll share.....in high school, our chem teacher was telling us how we couldnt do some new experiment he had done w/the previous year's class..i forget the exact details, but one of the results/byproducts of the experiment was the production of pungent/harmful gases...they did this part of the experiment under the hood, and thought they heard distant chirping, but ignored it...a little while later, someone looked out the window( a few floors up from the groundfloor), and a few dead pigeons were scattered on the ground...apparently the pigeons had been hanging out at the roof's end of the ventilation hood when the gas hit them......
 
Earlier this semester, some rocket scientist in my orgo II lab dumped his hot sand from his sand bath IN THE GARBAGE CAN and started a small fire. Our professor is also our lab instructor and he was royally PO'd. He was banned from the lab except for class time only. Our lab smelled like burning plastic for weeks.
 
I sneezed in the sterile hood. I was standing and the sneeze was so powerful that I sort of doubled over to put my head in just the right spot. It was actually very funny. There were a lot of people around and it was ACHOOO, then a lot of heads slowly turning to look at me like I was the biggest idiot ever.
 
Once I turned on the UV for a gel and forgot to put on glasses. :eek:
 
haha this is def one of my favorite threads :)
 
Crazy4F1 said:
had a similar thing with the guinea pigs. i had the thing under enough ketamine to stun a moderately sized elephant and it started screaming when i went to start the procedure. talk about heart wrenching :(
Click to expand...
I would have less problem with tying another human down and experimenting upon them.........
 
The lab tech in my lab left the water to our filtration system running overnight. It wasn't discovered until about 3am when there was water dripping from the ceiling 2 floors down...

Amazingly, my PI wasn't too upset, but the PI from the lab below ours was livid...
 
Top 10 reasons why I was never meant to be a scientist.

1)I dropped a few newborn/adult mice on the floor. The rules were that if they touch the ground, they had to be killed. Newborns had to be decapitated with scissors. Adults needed be killed by cervical dislocation because it is quick and relatively painless compared to CO2. A few times while I was doing cervical dislocation, I accidently pulled the whole spinal cord out while I was pulling the tail. It was a Mortal Kombat fatality except from the other end. Horrible.

2)Dropped my agarose gel trays almost routinely.

3)Poured liquid nitrogen down abandoned lab's sink destroying the sink and the floor beneath it.

4)Poured liquid nitrogen in an area outside destroying all living things in the area.

5)Lost important samples in the freezer.

6)Setup a cage for mating mice with all females.

7)Was doing plasmid preps and ended up spilling my sample all over my bench. Had to start over from beginning.

8)Miscalculated dilution for an experiment and got crazy results. Had to start the whole experiment over from beginning.

9)Forgot to label DNA side of southern blots. Had to start whole experiment over from beginning.

10)Just in case I missed one, messed up numerous other experiments...had to start whole experiment over from beginning...
 
SketchLazy said:
Top 10 reasons why I was never meant to be a scientist.

1)I dropped a few newborn/adult mice on the floor. The rules were that if they touch the ground, they had to be killed. Newborns had to be decapitated with scissors. Adults needed be killed by cervical dislocation because it is quick and relatively painless compared to CO2. A few times while I was doing cervical dislocation, I accidently pulled the whole spinal cord out while I was pulling the tail. It was a Mortal Kombat fatality except from the other end. Horrible.

2)Dropped my agarose gel trays almost routinely.

3)Poured liquid nitrogen down abandoned lab's sink destroying the sink and the floor beneath it.

4)Poured liquid nitrogen in an area outside destroying all living things in the area.

5)Lost important samples in the freezer.

6)Setup a cage for mating mice with all females.

7)Was doing plasmid preps and ended up spilling my sample all over my bench. Had to start over from beginning.

8)Miscalculated dilution for an experiment and got crazy results. Had to start the whole experiment over from beginning.

9)Forgot to label DNA side of southern blots. Had to start whole experiment over from beginning.

10)Just in case I missed one, messed up numerous other experiments...had to start whole experiment over from beginning...
Click to expand...
Holy crap.......I also recommend you not be a physician, an airline pilot, a bus driver, an air traffic controller, or any other job where accuracy and attention are required.
 
SketchLazy said:
Top 10 reasons why I was never meant to be a scientist.

1)I dropped a few newborn/adult mice on the floor. The rules were that if they touch the ground, they had to be killed. Newborns had to be decapitated with scissors. Adults needed be killed by cervical dislocation because it is quick and relatively painless compared to CO2. A few times while I was doing cervical dislocation, I accidently pulled the whole spinal cord out while I was pulling the tail. It was a Mortal Kombat fatality except from the other end. Horrible.
Click to expand...

This is the worst part. I never had to work with mice, but if I were in your shoes, I most likely would the set these mice free (in med school, even better :D) rather than killing them :smuggrin:
 
Only two weeks into my NIH fellowship but so far:

1. Had to repeat a PCR not once, not twice, but three times to get it right. It's become such an embarrassment that I no longer visualize my gels with other people around.

2. Had to repeat a transformation.

3. Attempted to make a 0.05% agarose gel. Not surprisingly, it did not solidify after two hours or...ever.

4. Had to repeat two midipreps. In one of them, I didn't get any DNA. In the other, the concentration was too low.

5. All of the oocytes I injected had died by the end of the next day cuz I punched holes that were too big in the course of injecting them. I knew it was a bad sign when all of the stuff inside the oocytes started leaking out through my injection holes...

6. Broke not one but two electrodes in the course of taking conductance measurements.

7. Got yelled at for not labeling a Petri dish of oocytes I put in the incubator (with all of the other dishes of oocytes). Got yelled at for the same thing the next day only to admit sheepishly that I couldn't remember where the oocytes were from (hence, the point of labeling stuff right away).

8. Some samples I sent for sequencing mysteriously got "lost."
 
all you guys who drop and break stuff in labs, should stay cleary away from infectious disease specialtys. :laugh:
 
I love this thread... I don't feel so alone in making all the mistakes I make! In my 4 years of research, I have...

1) set a small container of ethanol on fire when I placed my still-burning bacteria spreader into the container (not as bad as the post-doc who set half the lab on fire when he lit a container of acetone on fire, which proceeded to spread :eek:)

2) contaminated many, many flasks of cells. My grad lab worked with both mammalian cell culture and yeast, so with all the yeast floating around the main lab, we tended to track some of it into the tissue culture room and get lab-wide contaminations every few months. The worst contamination was when I was trying to make a stably-transfected cell line, and the cells got contaminated and I had to start over... which set me back 2 months!

3) messed up several 96-well plates of real-time PCR. Each plate probably runs about $1000.

4) left 36 tubes of purified RNA overnight in an ice bucket and came in the next day to find 36 tubes of degraded RNA in a bucket of water. (I agree this was pretty dumb, but I was trying to do 3 experiments at once and this was the day before the MCAT, so needless to say I was under alot of stress)

I'm sure I'll think of more, these are just the big ones.
 
I accidentally gave a rat a pulmonary embolism about a week after I started in my current lab. We implant our rats with jugular catheters that require daily flushing, and in an effort to be independent, I volunteered to flush a new group of rats alone. I was working in the dark, under a red light, and dropped the syringe full of saline. I picked it up and, without thinking twice, pushed about 0.2 mls of air into a periadolescent rat's catheter. I must have accidentally pulled the plunger as I was picking it up. It died right in my hand in about 30 seconds. I, quite literally, almost began crying there :cry:.
Instead, I had to go back to the lab and try to explain that a rat had just died while downplaying that I knew, full and well, that I had killed it :scared:. I think my exact words were "Well, I guess some air could have gotten in to the syringe." Everyone was really cool, but I felt like shiit for at least a month. I still think about the little guy. When I told my mom, she said "Well, at least you learned your lesson now, and you didn't do this with a human patient." Thanks, mom.
 
Errr... Yes.. blooopers...maybe not "big ones", but bloopers nonetheless.

I accidentally broke a tungsten heater coil once, but managed to fix it before anyone found out :D (but I confessed all that happened anyways...lol)

I accidentally "forgot" to refrigerate an agar plate I was supposed to, ...When i opened the lid...you can't even begin to imagine the things that were growing in there. :laugh:

I accidentally caused a couple testubes filled with acid, a magnetic stirbar, and glass beads to slip away (yea..from them 'ole clumsy butterfingers :laugh::D) and crash and break...making a loud noise that attracted EVERYONE'S attention...suddenly there was silence...and I was like..."....Uh..I'm sorry"

I accidentally failed to correctly assess the quantity of ketamine I'd need to knock out a mouse I was operating on...and turned out..it actually WOKE UP!!!! IN THE MIDDLE OF SURGERY WITH IT'S CHEST WIDE OPEN!! :eek: Thank God, I gave it some more in time, before it could've died of pain. That was a horrible experience. (THANK GOD MICE DON’T HAVE LAWYERS :laugh:)

There have been many more from where these came from...so many that I can't even remember. You could probably make an hour long movie out of it, scene after scene of TTH bloopers.

Funny thing though...The first few minutes after every time I made a mistake I honestly thought.. "Oh boy TTH,,...now you've done it...you're DEAD!", but each time it just worked out alright, and I hopefully learned from my mistakes :laugh:
 
Just one mistake so far,

In ochem, I handed my lab partner the condenser / rb flask set up as we were dismantling it and made sure he had it..i asked twice .."do you have that..be careful not to drop it"...he assured me he had it. I turned around and heard a whoa...followed by the distinctive sound of shattering glass. There was our experiment flowing across the hood after watching it drip for 2 hours. It gets better.....he then threw the condenser down lifting the hose out of the sink.... We preceded to clean up the broken flask and its content. 4 or 5 mins later, I walked to his side of the hood to notice that i was standing in water. he had managed to not cut off the water and leave the condenser hose on full power flowing out the back of the hood.Half the lab was now flooded. Another person who was working as a partner that day had gone to the restroom. He came back in with a bewildered expression on his face as we were laughing at the course of events. Needless to say, i spent a half hour mopping the lab and another 2 hours redoing the experiment... I told the TA...." i like to leave the lab cleaner than it was when i got here".....
 
i was moving an AFM body with one hand, and the post-doc politely asked me to use both hands because if i drop it, he will have no work
 
Wow, I had just gotten to page 3 of this thread laughing at everyone when I realized I forgot to put the $300k machine I use on standby flow with running buffer. Suffice to say I ran over there real quicklike.
 
In 11th grade chemistry lab, my finger twitched and i sprayed superconcentrated hydrochloric acid over a girl's arm. When she turned around and looked at me and said, "Is that hydrochloric acid!?!?!?" I was like "uhhhh no it's water" I then told her it was i didn't know any better ha ha.


In my genetics research, I had SUPERCONCENTRATED hydrchloric acid with a pH of -2 or -3 and literally fell over my shoe. You could see like this steaming burning vapor come off from the shoe, and nevertheless i took my shoes off as quickly as you would if you were about to have sex with hot girl.

I also spilled hot ethanol over a piece of paper that almost caused a fire but luckily this was done in the fume hood so we were able to cut off oxygen to it.


My lab partner was using tritium (hydrogen with 3 neutrons), and is pretty radioactive and spilled that **** all over the floor and over her arms. You can't detect it with a Geiger counter, has a half-life of 12 years and is probably a carcinogenic.


RADIATION ASSAYS ROCK
 
Just a few weeks ago, I was making dry ice back in the corner of my lab where all of the gas cylinders are located. Well, this also happens to be the area where all of the dewar flasks (the ones you use to put liquid nitrogen in) are. Well, I was opening the wooden box after the dry ice was made, and I accidentally let one of the sides fall down really fast and didn't realize that a dewar was sitting right there. It tipped over and, as I had been warned before but had never experienced, it basically imploded. There was the loudest bang I think I have ever heard, and it promptly shot out a whole bunch of glass and broke a couple of crystallization dishes that were sitting near where it fell. It scared me so much that I had to take a minute to catch my breath, and I was a little shaky. Luckily it tipped over near the wall instead of like onto someone, because someone could have gotten hurt. I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure those things are pretty expensive....

Then the other day I unplugged a hot plate that was in the fume hood, and a minute later I decided that I would need it after all, so I plugged back in what I thought was the cord to the hot plate. Well, turns out I grabbed the wrong cord that was hanging out of the hood - what I grabbed was the cord to the little clips that heat up the oil bath, but these clips can't be plugged into the regular outlet, they have to be plugged into the transformer because the voltage is too high. About 5 seconds after I plugged it in, one of the clips must have touched the metal of the hood because I heard this huge pop, saw a flash of light, and the fuse to the whole hood was blown. I'm just glad I wasn't leaning into the hood when this happened....but it scared me!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Next unread thread

Similar threads

D
Choosing best clinical volunteering while working full-time
Replies
1
Views
318
chilly_md
chilly_md
D
Does the lab you work in really matter?
Replies
9
Views
716
Mr.Smile12
Mr.Smile12
A
  • Question
How to work after the big A
Replies
2
Views
865
Moko
Moko
J
Course pacing while working full-time
Replies
4
Views
547
Planes2Doc
Planes2Doc
P
How bad is it to not be employed full time while applying?
Replies
15
Views
1K
LizzyM
LizzyM
Top