Worst Lab Experiences...

[Doc.Holliday]

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post your most horrific experiences in gen chem, orgo, bio, physics or research labs.

i could use a good laugh.

i'll start:
last semester Orgo I lab final. some genious decided we would do 2 labs in one lab period graded almost entirely on yield and procedures etc. the TAs were walking around like hawks scribbling minuses for everyone throughout the experiment. it would have been really stressful if all had gone perfectly, but for me it sadly didnt. the experiment called for bromination under reflux with a light, a 100 to 200 watt lightbulb at least i believe the book read. ok, so i set up my apparatus measured everything out, all going smoothly, started the experiment, all was well. it was supposed to take 30 minutes for the reaction to fully complete and it to turn from rusty colored to clear. at so at 30 minutes it was still rather colored, waited another 20, still colored. wtf? decided to go ahead and add cyclohexane and proceed, but when it came time to collect the product that was to have formed from that previous reaction, i didnt get a damn thing. oh ****. so i had to start over again. did everything perfectly once more, then 20 minutes into me waiting for the color change again, i decided hey, i wonder if these bastard would be so cruel as to plant a sub 100 watt light bulb at the lab stations, and yes, the bastards had sneakily planed an effing 40watt in mine. hah, lab was more than half over at this point, i hadnt even started the first part of the first experiment, and then after that i was to outline my procedures and observations and answer a ton of postlab questions. i asked my TA if i would be allowed to redo the lab in another section, he said in broken english that i could either take the itsy bitsy bit of product id recovered from the first failed try and go with that and fail because of terrible yield or i could just not do it and therefore fail. yay for me, such fine choices. so i worked my ass off, rushed through the entire thing and scribbled all my post lab jibberish. during that time i must have broken a good fourth of my glass equipment and managed to shoot a pipet across the room almost impailing a classmate while trying to bubble a solution. i finished, with a burnt wrist, cancer im sure from exposure to nasty chemicals, and id bet a terribly low final lab grade, oh and an absolute hatred for my ta and the lab director. i ended up getting a B-, not the end of the world, but unwarranted id say since i had a solid A going into that and it wasnt my damn fault those dirty bastards

 

[vhawk]

I took orgo my freshman year, due to some college transfer credits from HS. Anyhow, in high school I never drank, but freshman year I discovered Hot 100. My and my "buddies" sat around playing cards as I drank an entire 1.75 of Hot 100 along with about a quarter of Capn Morgans, until about 5:30 am. Lab started at 8, and at about 9:15 my girlfried(and also lab partner, LONG story) calls me up screaming in my incredibly hung over ear that we had a test and I needed to get there immediately. So, I sprint there with puke drying on my lips, and take this lab practical exam with her, takes about an hour and a half, during which I excuse myself to go throw up FIVE times. I must have looked like the worlds biggest pile, but apparently only my GF and classmates noticed, cause I squeaked out a B on the test(with her help) and my prof never said a word. Immediately went home and threw up until 9 at night, when I was able to get a glass of water down. Horrible lab experience, wonderful life experience.

 

[browniegirl86]

I'm gonna go with research lab:

1) Spilling my PCR reaction mixture halfway through composing it and having to use a brand new tube of expensive-ass enzyme.

2) Throwing away a rare sample of V. cholerae during a public health research project (I thought we had done the full range of tests on it), only to discover that I needed to do serology and biotyping on that sample. But the sample was gone and there was no way to get it back. Oops.

They're not TOO terrible . . . a kid next to me in orgo lab spilled concentrated benzocaine on his hand during the benzocaine synth lab=numb hand. He then proceeded not to wear gloves while working with concentrated sulfuric acid, spill it on his benzocaine-covered hand, and not notice anything until he looked down and saw the huge blister that was forming on the back of his hand. Smart kid 😎

 

[mwhou]

kid next to me in orgo lab spilled concentrated benzocaine on his hand during the benzocaine synth lab=numb hand. He then proceeded not to wear gloves while working with concentrated sulfuric acid, spill it on his benzocaine-covered hand, and not notice anything until he looked down and saw the huge blister that was forming on the back of his hand. Smart kid 😎

that kids going to make some malpractice attorneys very happy someday.

 

[45408]

The f&*(#*)@ stopper wouldn't go on the volumetric flask in analytical lab, so I just forced it. That didn't work so well when the shaft of the flask sheared off and the entire flask exploded (thankfully it wasn't acid 😱 ). I only cut my finger, and the two girls next to my hood cleaned it all up for me. 😀

 

[Sarikate]

Accidentally exposed myself to Anthracis bacillus. HAH! Luckily it was the control strain, which didn't have a virulence factor. All those damn cardboard boxes I had to go through, though...what a bitch.

Also fell in love with a PhD student over fluorescence microscopy, only to find out later he was gay. Alas!

 

[SanDiegoSOD]

As a frosh in a general chem lab, I combined 15 molar NaOh with 12 Molar HCl. Needless to say, the test tube couldn't withstand the massive exothermic reaction, and the solution splattered everywhere, along with glass shards. Thank God that I was "working" in a hood, or there would have been more than a few unhappy lab partners.

Take home point: When the lab TA specifically tells you NOT to combine solutions, DONT do it. 👍

 

[Nittany Lion]

One night this summer, after staying up ALL night unwillingly due to roommates' getting wasted and feeling the need to throw FLOUR all over me and my boyfriend as a practical joke (ever heard of "antiquing?" haha)... I had to be in lab at 6:30 am to weigh and feed mice for an experiment I was helping to run.

I was supposed to be dilligently recording the mouse weights as my PI read them out to me, but after about 5 mintues of her monotonous number-calling, I had COMPLETELY fallen asleep in my chair! Needless to say, she was NOT happy, I could have totally screwed up her data, and she told everyone else in the lab about what happened so I pretty much never heard the end of it. Yeah... I'm living alone next summer

 

[stoic]

in organic lab i needed some NaOH tablets for a mixture. i was having a tough time witht he forceps, so i picked them up with my fingers. it hurt.

earlier this year i was in the lab where i work doing some nucleic acid extractions the super old school way (ya know, phenol/chcl3 style). i had a spin going in the 'fuge at like 10k rpm with 50ml tubes full of cell lysate and the phenol/chchl3 when i heard this sickening "pop..." one of the tubes had failed. what a ****ing mess. crushed glass and really nasty chemicals went everwhere.

 

[tigress]

in organic lab i needed some NaOH tablets for a mixture. i was having a tough time witht he forceps, so i picked them up with my fingers. it hurt.

earlier this year i was in the lab where i work doing some nucleic acid extractions the super old school way (ya know, phenol/chcl3 style). i had a spin going in the 'fuge at like 10k rpm with 50ml tubes full of cell lysate and the phenol/chchl3 when i heard this sickening "pop..." one of the tubes had failed. what a ****ing mess. crushed glass and really nasty chemicals went everwhere.

where do you still use glass centrifuge tubes?????

 

[Dr. Donkey]

As a warning to lab manual writers, pre-meds take instructions at face value (or at least stupid ones):

Here is an summary of the directions:
1)Add a bunch of chemicals to a separatory funnel including HCl and other goodies
2)Add solid CO2
3)Stopper and shake

Result: Explosion in my hand.

It was kindof funny. The funnel broke apart and the glass stopper literally went flying across the room and almost took someone's head off standing about 20 feets from me. Luckily the acids and such were of a fairly low molarity.

I guess I should have waited for the CO2 to stop subliming... 😕 . Maybe that's why I got a C, haha.

 

[twicetenturns]

So in my job as Aquatic Technician for a large zebrafish lab here in Boston, I maintain all manner of things related to fish husbandry. One of these is the storage and ordering of foodstuffs. When I was first hired I knew nothing of what it took to feed these fish. Turns out that it just requires an iron will and thousands of pounds of sea monkeys (brine shrimp). One particularly fatefull day I discovered that it was to be my job to stow away the new shipment of sea monkeys. Little did I know that we stored the heavy boxes in the carcass freezer in the sub-basement. 4 hours and many crates later (remember - thousands of pounds) I was almost done, having been exposed to the pale frozen stench of death for hours. (There were huge crates of dead mice, rabbits, dogs, etc. If you had a dead animal, this was the party place to be) It was at this time that an Animal Research Care and Handling manager noticed my Sisyphean toil. He informed me that I could by no means store my sea monkeys in the carcass freezer, and that I now had to move him. I plead for sanity's sake, but he would hear none of it. After lunch, (a roast beef sandwich I could no longer eat) I went back down and spent the next four hours unloading all the thousands of pounds of sea monkeys from the carcass freezer. My Boss owed me big time for that one.

 

[Thundrstorm]

So in my job as Aquatic Technician for a large zebrafish lab here in Boston, I maintain all manner of things related to fish husbandry. One of these is the storage and ordering of foodstuffs. When I was first hired I knew nothing of what it took to feed these fish. Turns out that it just requires an iron will and thousands of pounds of sea monkeys (brine shrimp). One particularly fatefull day I discovered that it was to be my job to stow away the new shipment of sea monkeys. Little did I know that we stored the heavy boxes in the carcass freezer in the sub-basement. 4 hours and many crates later (remember - thousands of pounds) I was almost done, having been exposed to the pale frozen stench of death for hours. (There were huge crates of dead mice, rabbits, dogs, etc. If you had a dead animal, this was the party place to be) It was at this time that an Animal Research Care and Handling manager noticed my Sisyphean toil. He informed me that I could by no means store my sea monkeys in the carcass freezer, and that I now had to move him. I plead for sanity's sake, but he would hear none of it. After lunch, (a roast beef sandwich I could no longer eat) I went back down and spent the next four hours unloading all the thousands of pounds of sea monkeys from the carcass freezer. My Boss owed me big time for that one.

Oh man, I feel you on that one. A couple of summers ago, I interned in a fish lab in D.C. in the basement of a museum. One of my projects was to sift through frozen marine samples that were 10 years old. In addition to the fact that some were already decaying when they had been frozen, I had to go into the ancient carcass freezer, which has been turned off and defrosted accidentally and then refrozen several times in its 50 year history without ever being cleaned. I'd have to take a deep breath, and hold it while I leaped over dead whales and crap to grab my crates, and I had to do this twice a day for 3 weeks. It smelled so bad and the smell lingered so much that I'd have to change clothes and cover my hair, for fear that no one would sit next to me on the subway. It took me over a year after that to eat fish again.

 

[skoaner]

1) Senior Biochemical Methods Lab - I had a lab partner who didn't speak english and the lab was partner based, so I got screwed on the grade because she didn't understand what she was doing. She ended up dropping the course leaving me high and dry

2) My current research position - Cloning projects are usually unfun, plus the lab is as loud as an airport and as small as a handicapped bathroom stall.

 

[aprince80]

I caught a hood on fire!
I was plating, you know, when you have to place the glass spreader in a dish with alcohol flame it then plate, well, the day before I had broken the glass dish, so instead the alcohol was in a plastic Petri dish. I flamed the spreader then for some unknown reason placed it back in the alcohol, it of course, caught on fire and, since the container was plastic, began to melt and spread all over the hood. I had no idea what to do as I was the only on in lab, so I just ran down the hall yelling fire. My PI was super happy when he came back and saw a giant burn mark. It was a strange day.

 

[arraysyn]

This chinese postdoc I worked for wanted me to work on radioactive p32 experiment. However, he did not want me to waste time for going through the proper radioactive safety training. It takes 8 hours of training to get the proper safety license. He felt the time spent on the training would slow down his career progress. Luckily, our lab manager found out the situation and have it correct. He is a pure slave-driver without regard to the safety of others. This happens many years ago and I am still piss off 😡 to this date whenever I thought of his selfishness.

 

[superdevil]

this didn't happen to me, it happened to a friend of mine. as told by him:

my friend was running an organic lab for amine identification. his unknown (i cannot recall the chemical name) was a strong topical anesthetic, and after accidently getting it all over his arm, he was quite alarmed when he arm went numb. he was freaking out saying "get it off! get it off!" he then rushed to go rinse his arm off with water. forgetting that this chemical was also a very strong base, he felt like someone set his arm on fire as he yelled "ahhh! put it back on! put it back on!"

 

[coomassie]

This past summer I was working in a stem cell lab in China as part of one of those research training programs. The program was supposed to have included some language training thing before leaving the country but the guy that organized everything "forgot" to schedule me into one of them. Anyways, I get to china knowing not a single word in mandarin (other than how to oder beer, needless to say an essential). On my first day of lab the PI handed over a binder with all the protocols, unfortunately they were all in characters. So not only did I have to learn new techniques but I had to translate the protocol before I could start on anything. Well one of those translation led to the dumping of some crucial stem cells down the drain. Apperently the person that was helping me out with the translation did not know the difference between vortexing and centrufugation. Oh well, live and learn. I sure did hear it from my PI.

 

[ShyRem]

My dad is a chemistry professor, and he came home TOTALLY disgusted one day. His TA was running a lab for nursing students when they started to complain about headaches.. then one passed out. Then another passed out. Two more in short order. Turns out they were working with ether and had, shall we say, flooded the room with ether vapors. Apparently the instructions CLEARLY stated to do the experiment in the hood, but they decided it was "too hard", so the ether was evaporating like crazy. They also didn't know the effects of ether on the human body. Yeah, I want one of *them* for a nurse!

When I took G-chem lab, one poor kid was working in the hood and turned on the "air" to dry a piece of equipment. Next thing I know he's making fish faces and nothing is coming out of his mouth. Behind him is this beautiful wall of flame about two feet high. The "air" was the gas, which ignited upon contact with his burner. Lit the whole hood up like a beautiful fireplace and burst all of the glass he was using in his experiment... First time I ever saw a PhD run. Poor kid failed the class, too.

 

[stoic]

where do you still use glass centrifuge tubes?????

had to use them for this extraction. we didn't have any plastic tubes rated for use with pure phenol.

 

[QofQuimica]

LMAO, you guys are hysterical. Ok, I gotta be fair. Here are mine:

As a student:
I was trying to clip my flask on the rotovap after a long process of extraction, working up, and chromatographing. Well, my gloves were wet and the d*** thing slid out of my hands, right into the rotovap water bath. So, guess what, I got to re-extract the entire water bath, which is probably about a gallon of water. Then I had to re-chromatograph. That really sucked.

As a TA:
Oh my god, where do I begin. Well, there was the one kid (engineering major, gotta watch out for those engineers!) who decided to heat his test tube with the stopper on after I'd specifically warned the class multiple times to NEVER heat anything that was sealed. The stopper burst out of the tube straight up in the air and hit the ceiling, leaving a lovely burn mark on the fluorescent light bulb. I didn't know whether to laugh or yell at him, and so I ended up trying to yell but probably not very intelligibly because I was crying from laughing so hard. The stockroom manager saw the whole thing, and he just stood there and shook his head without saying a word.

Then there are the kids who lack any common sense. One tried to put her crystals in the closed end of the melting point tube, and couldn't figure out why they wouldn't shake down to the bottom. One kid put his TLC plate in water instead of solvent, and the silica just fell off the plate. One kid tried to add sodium sulfate directly to the sep funnel and clogged the whole thing with a solid sodium sulfate mass. And my personal favorite: one kid came up to ask whether this was her unknown. What was she holding? The soap dish, full of soap. To my credit, I managed to tell her with a straight face that no, it wasn't her unknown, it was soap, which is a known compound. Then I went into the stockroom, stuck my head in the hood, and howled.

 

[EllieElle]

In my first semester of Orgo lab, we had to make a filter pipette out of glass Pasteur pipettes (the ones with the really long, thin tube at the end). This is supposed to be done by packing cotton into the thick part with a metal rod, which our TA didn't put out. I decided I would make mine by using another Pasteur pipette (the long thin end) to pack in the cotton, which turned out to be the worst idea EVER. Both pipettes shattered, and the thin end of one stuck right into my thumb and broke off. My TA flipped out and begged me not to go to the nurse, so my lab partner (an EMT) pulled out the glass and I left it alone.

Two months later, my scar on my thumb still hadn't healed and I had sharp pains whenever I pushed on the pad of my finger. An enterprising friend and I sterilized my Swiss army knife and began to operate on my thumb and... tada! Pulled an eighth of an inch Pasteur pipette tip shard out of my finger. And thus began my passion for surgery...

 

[ellia08]

Incredibly embarrassing moment:

I was preping human tissue for my laser on first day and my research advisor walks up and says "ellia whats wrong with this picture?". I look at the setup.

Tissue correctly sliced and pinned, sitting correctly in dish, temp=correct, unit is on, laser is setup correctly, I'm not wearing jewery.... crap... what in the world can be wrong? Is this some sorr of reverse psychology test? no, he wouldnt do that would he? would he?.... argh!!! what can it be???!!!!

Ohhhhhhhh. Riiiiiiight. Must actually lower water bath dish IN TO THE WATER.


Second most embarrasing moment:

its one in the morning and I'm finishing up an experiment which is in its final incubation period. Thinking I'm alone I start singing at the top of my lungs the song thats playing on the radio and dancing around like an idiot (and I mean DANCING). Who knew my PI was right behind me?

(this story may be repeated numerous times replacing the begining with: "I was swearing a blue streak at my computer...", or "I was making faces at the other undergraduate...", or "I was sitting on the floor of my office to do my writeup because it is more comfortable down there...". Its a good thing my professional alter ego is productive or I'd be in trouble by now.)

 

[skoaner]

My old PI used to pimp the newbies or stupid kids by asking them complex questions with simple solutions. E.G. he would say we want this sample spun at 40k x g, how many rpm's is it on this centrifuge? So the kids would spend an hour measuring the rotor and crunching the numbers and inevitably half of them would fail miserably. Then he'd laugh and push the RPM/RCF button and say "Q.E.D."

 

[clockworktangel]

In G-chem lab, our TA (as TA's tend to do, and rightfully so) repeatedly warned us never to expose ethanol to direct heat. So one day we're boiling water in a beaker on a hot plate, and the TA comes over, and one of my lab partners asks of her, "So what are we supposed to do after heating the ethanol?" And this look of shock comes over her face: "Oh my god, no, DON'T!!" My partner laughs and is like, "Don't worry, I'm just kidding, it's water."

That's when she showed us a massive scar on her arm from an ethanol fire...

 

[superdevil]

Then there are the kids who lack any common sense. One tried to put her crystals in the closed end of the melting point tube, and couldn't figure out why they wouldn't shake down to the bottom.

that's absolutely awesome. things like that are what make labs worthwhile (it certainly isn't all of the supposed "learning" we're doing, after all)!

 

[vhawk]

This chinese postdoc I worked for wanted me to work on radioactive p32 experiment. However, he did not want me to waste time for going through the proper radioactive safety training. It takes 8 hours of training to get the proper safety license. He felt the time spent on the training would slow down his career progress. Luckily, our lab manager found out the situation and have it correct. He is a pure slave-driver without regard to the safety of others. This happens many years ago and I am still piss off 😡 to this date whenever I thought of his selfishness.

Yeah, I worked in a nuclear facility lab, and if you think 8 hrs of training was too much for your postdoc, I had to do like 20 hours, over a week, it was ridiculous. Well, suffice it to say that my rental house was packed with radon, so pretty much EVERY DAY i set off the full-body count contamination detector, sounding a lovely alarm. This process requires me to remain perfectly still, touch absolutely nothing, and wait for the rad techs to come and sweep my whole body by hand. Yeah, this was a weekly occurrance at least, and just minutes and minutes of fun for all involved.

 

[vhawk]

LMAO, you guys are hysterical. Ok, I gotta be fair. Here are mine:

As a student:
I was trying to clip my flask on the rotovap after a long process of extraction, working up, and chromatographing. Well, my gloves were wet and the d*** thing slid out of my hands, right into the rotovap water bath. So, guess what, I got to re-extract the entire water bath, which is probably about a gallon of water. Then I had to re-chromatograph. That really sucked.

As a TA:
Oh my god, where do I begin. Well, there was the one kid (engineering major, gotta watch out for those engineers!) who decided to heat his test tube with the stopper on after I'd specifically warned the class multiple times to NEVER heat anything that was sealed. The stopper burst out of the tube straight up in the air and hit the ceiling, leaving a lovely burn mark on the fluorescent light bulb. I didn't know whether to laugh or yell at him, and so I ended up trying to yell but probably not very intelligibly because I was crying from laughing so hard. The stockroom manager saw the whole thing, and he just stood there and shook his head without saying a word.

Then there are the kids who lack any common sense. One tried to put her crystals in the closed end of the melting point tube, and couldn't figure out why they wouldn't shake down to the bottom. One kid put his TLC plate in water instead of solvent, and the silica just fell off the plate. One kid tried to add sodium sulfate directly to the sep funnel and clogged the whole thing with a solid sodium sulfate mass. And my personal favorite: one kid came up to ask whether this was her unknown. What was she holding? The soap dish, full of soap. To my credit, I managed to tell her with a straight face that no, it wasn't her unknown, it was soap, which is a known compound. Then I went into the stockroom, stuck my head in the hood, and howled.

My vote for post of the year

 

[Thundrstorm]

For developmental bio lab, we had to make windows in fertilized chicken eggs so we could watch the embryos develop. We had to keep them sterile, avoid making scrambled egss, etc. and my partner and I managed to do that just fine, but we nearly burned the lab down b/c we set the lit parafin candle used for sealing the coverslip on the shell in a plastic dish that melted all over the bench and started smoking. Ah, to have technical skills, but no common sense 🙂

I've also done the whole exploding sealed tube thing in organic lab.

 

[musiclink213]

working in the stockroom, i've managed to see plenty of stupidity, since i am usually the one who sees the aftereffects. and no matter how many times you tell someone to hold something from the bottom because it's loose, there is still someone who will hold it from the top and the entire thing goes splat.

after an organic lab, i went in there to clean up. they were using ethanol i believe, or something with similar side effects, which should have stayed in the hood. i came in there about an hour after the last student had left since i was making up solutions in the stockroom. i opened the door and got so light headed. turns out, some smart orgo student left the cap off the bottle and took it out of the hood, so it was sitting on a bench top. the bottle was empty.

then, there was the time another girl was making up different concentrations of sulfuric acid from the stock concentrated stuff. she had poured out the amount she needed, put the huge bottle down, and the bottom of the bottle just gave out. the entire bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid just spiilt all over. it ate away at the inside of the hood and the floor it spilled on to.

then, in orgo lab, this one girl who isn't exactly too bright, was doing an experiment. i was in the same lab she was in and am a first hand eye witness. we had to do something where the solution had to heat at around 160 or whatever it was for 20 minutes. so she gets her solution up to the temp. and then walks away without lowering the heat. she's gone, she's gone, then all of a sudden, we hear a loud explosion. not only had her thermometer popped, but so did the glassware she was using.

as for me, well, i've got too many embarassing stories. in quant lab one day, i ket dropping and breaking everything at least twice. so i'd break a beaker, get another one, and then break it again. after that, my prof. nicknamed me butter fingers and still calls me that. then, in orgo lab, i had a prof. who didn't warn us about the dangers of that stuff who's name i'm blanking on. i think maybe steel wool, but i'm not sure. if you touch it with bare hands, it gets stuck in your skin and doesn't come out. feels like hundreds of little splinters. yea, that was me.

in gen chem, we were titrating something, but i couldn't see the top of the buret. so instead of lowering it, for some reason, i decided to raise myself up. so i put my hands on the bench top and lifted myself off the ground (lets hear it for upper body work!) and then, when i was reading off the number, my hand slipped and i ended up falling right onto my tailbone. luckily, my prof wasn't around to see that, otherwise i doubt he would be writing me an LOR right now.

 

[PostalWookie]

I learned that when you put too many boiling stucks into a hot liquid, things turn ugly very quickly.

 

[QofQuimica]

then, there was the time another girl was making up different concentrations of sulfuric acid from the stock concentrated stuff. she had poured out the amount she needed, put the huge bottle down, and the bottom of the bottle just gave out. the entire bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid just spiilt all over. it ate away at the inside of the hood and the floor it spilled on to.

Ha ha, this one reminds me of another stupid thing that I did as a student. I wanted to keep some dichloromethane in my hood, and I poured some into a 500 mL plastic bottle, screwed the cap on, and went home for the night. In the morning, I came back to find that the entire surface of my hood was coated with a shiny layer of something that looked like varnish. My first reaction was to think that one of my labmates was playing a trick on me, but then the guy I thought had done it came over to my hood and picked up the bottle, and that's when I noticed that there was no bottom to it anymore: the DCM had completely eaten the bottom of the bottle away, and THAT was what was all over my hood. So a lesson to all of you who are doing organic lab: don't put the DCM in a plastic bottle. The prof never did find out how that hood got varnished....

Here's another student story: one of my labmates decided that he wanted to have a cold beer, but he didn't want to put it in the fridge and wait a half hour like a normal person. Instead, he put it into the -78 C freezer. Unfortunately, he got distracted and forgot about putting it in there. When we opened the freezer next, there was a quite amazing sight: the beer bottle cap had burst off the top of the bottle, and the beer, which had burst out of the bottle, was frozen solid in mid air; it froze so quickly that it never even hit the shelf. It was pretty cool, and we kept it in there for a few months until the professor saw it and made us take it out.

TA story: It was my first semester as a TA, and I had a gen chem class. One kid got frustrated with her experiment and basically had a temper tantrum. She was throwing her glassware around, breaking the beakers, etc. Now you have to understand, I am not very big, and this girl was a freaking Amazon. She was a foot taller than me, she was into some serious weightlifting, and she was just out of control, trashing my lab. So I did the only thing I could think of, which was to walk up to her, get right into her face, and demand that she come outside with me, NOW. To my surprise, she meekly went outside without saying a word, and when I followed her out wondering what the heck I was going to do with her now, she started sobbing hysterically. So there I was, standing on my tiptoes, hugging this gigantic girl, telling her that it was ok, but yes, she did have to pay for the glassware she broke. And then I left her out there to collect herself, and I went back inside to the class, and I was just shaking like crazy. But I lived to TA another day.

Finally, I have to apologize to you engineers when I suggested before that all of you guys are dangerous in the lab. Or at least I want to amend my previous stereotype to not include chemical engineers. I have one in my class this semester, and he's very good. 👍 But I'm still scared of those mechanical engineers.

 

[stormpr]

I was the TA for organic chem lab and I'd warned my students about putting corks on test tubes. the test tubes were cheap and the corks were cheaper, often tubes would break if you tried to force the cork. so of course, one of my students half way through lab comes over to me and says, "hey, i cut myself on a test-tube" (doing EXACTLY what i'd told them NOT to do) but the catch was, he'd severed an artery in his thumb and was squirting blood at a distance of about three feet all over the lab. I mean this stuff was shooting out of his thumb and he just looks at me and says "uh, what should i do"<squirt><squirt><squirt>. he didn't even hold it or anything he's just holding his thumb out at me and spraying the ground with blood like he didn't know that people bleed when they get cut. URRRGHHH!!!! as a side note, this same person is now the president of the chemistry society at our school. amazing!

 

[musiclink213]

I was the TA for organic chem lab and I'd warned my students about putting corks on test tubes. the test tubes were cheap and the corks were cheaper, often tubes would break if you tried to force the cork. so of course, one of my students half way through lab comes over to me and says, "hey, i cut myself on a test-tube" (doing EXACTLY what i'd told them NOT to do) but the catch was, he'd severed an artery in his thumb and was squirting blood at a distance of about three feet all over the lab. I mean this stuff was shooting out of his thumb and he just looks at me and says "uh, what should i do"<squirt><squirt><squirt>. he didn't even hold it or anything he's just holding his thumb out at me and spraying the ground with blood like he didn't know that people bleed when they get cut. URRRGHHH!!!! as a side note, this same person is now the president of the chemistry society at our school. amazing!

eh, i'm not that impressed. i'm the VP of our chemical society because nobody else ran. It's a rule that the pres and vice pres be chem or biochem majors, and there aren't that many of us. there was no competition, just "ok, so who wants to be president? you? ok good. Vice pres? hey you, you're a biochem major, you'll be vice pres." yep, that's how i got to be vice president.

 

[ShyRem]

eh, i'm not that impressed. i'm the VP of our chemical society because nobody else ran. It's a rule that the pres and vice pres be chem or biochem majors, and there aren't that many of us. there was no competition, just "ok, so who wants to be president? you? ok good. Vice pres? hey you, you're a biochem major, you'll be vice pres." yep, that's how i got to be vice president.

I got to be secretary without even knowing. I was notified by a chem professor that I had to see so-and-so 'cuz she was the pres and I was secretary.

 

[Perrin]

A friend of mine (Grad Student) was performing an experiment involving I-131 labeled organic compounds and DMSO. Well, DMSO helps stabilize lipid membranes so the labeled compunds can enter cells more easily. He was carrying a tray of flasks adn one tipped over, spilling its contents on his hand. He freaked out and left the lab to go home and shower off...not the best idea. He later calls the Dept head and tells him what happened. Our Rad. Safety Officer spent the next week getting smears of everything in the building.

Results: About 4 doorknobs, 1 elevator, 1 set of clothes, 1 steering wheel, 1 car door, and 1 bathtub were contaminated. He also had to have his thyroid tested every month for the next 2 years.

 

[dopaminophile]

I was using a brand new murcury manostat, which I'd spent 150 of my very sparse undergrad research dollars on to ease my compound out of the sludge I swore that it was in. This thing was a type that only one senior chemist had ever seen (not the usual cartesian diver type) but uses at least two pounds of mercury. So, as I'm trying learn how to use it, I had cleaned my entire vacuum system, regreased all of my joints, cleaned and reloaded my high and low manometers (a task in itself), and added a second trap (because that's a helluva lot of mercury). I followed the logical steps, held a solid 12 torr, and enjoyed a successful test run. As I began to equalize the pressure on either side of the manostat, I turned the stopcocks in the wrong order. The useful end of my system was at 12 torr while the rest was at an interstellar pressure. The difference pushed my 2 pounds of mercury out of the monostat, through some tubing into one trap, which filled, my next trap, which filled, and into my vacuum pump, which died.

I spent the rest of the day with a liter of nitric acid cleaning the whole system and trying unsuccessfully to fix my pump. Despite destroying the pump with an unknown amount of mercury and creating a load of mercury waste, everybody else in the organic labs thought it was pretty funny. In the end, I got my custom vacuum system back down to interstellar pressures--the envy of the department still--and never made the mistake again.

-dope-

 

[dopaminophile]

This isn't exactly my personal disaster, but the silliness of the scenario warrants a post. Our stockroom manager had gotten in several large containers of diethly ether year or so ago, which were never used. When he or one of his lackies (still undetermined) went to store them a while back, he forgot to date them. This is a necessity because ethers tend to form very unstable peroxides if left alone for 20 years or so. Not long after storing the bottles, the fire marshall decided to do a suprise inspection of our labs. The ethers are one of the things that they look for and of course they found them. Everyone involved with the bottles knew that they were far too young to have gone south yet, but the fire marshall would have none of it. He ordered the evacuation of the entire building (myself mid-distillation included). He called in the bomb squad, which used their bomb robot to remove the bottles, put them in their bomb trailer, and hauled them to their firing range where they (I kid you not) shot at them until they exploded. I couldn't help but laugh.

-dope-

 

[skoaner]

In G-chem lab, our TA (as TA's tend to do, and rightfully so) repeatedly warned us never to expose ethanol to direct heat. So one day we're boiling water in a beaker on a hot plate, and the TA comes over, and one of my lab partners asks of her, "So what are we supposed to do after heating the ethanol?" And this look of shock comes over her face: "Oh my god, no, DON'T!!" My partner laughs and is like, "Don't worry, I'm just kidding, it's water."

That's when she showed us a massive scar on her arm from an ethanol fire...

Ahh, correct me if I'm wrong as its been a while, but isn't part of the distillation process the heating of ethanol?

 

[stormpr]

Ahh, correct me if I'm wrong as its been a while, but isn't part of the distillation process the heating of ethanol?

its one thing to distill ethanol from water over a heating surface (azeotropes anyone) and quite another to do the same thing over an open flame... im sure that the open flame part was the source of the problem.... ahhh speaking of flamed ethanol, I could go for some cherries jubilee right about now

 

[browniegirl86]

Accidentally exposed myself to Anthracis bacillus. HAH! Luckily it was the control strain, which didn't have a virulence factor. All those damn cardboard boxes I had to go through, though...what a bitch.

Also fell in love with a PhD student over fluorescence microscopy, only to find out later he was gay. Alas!

Aww I did the same thing with M. tuberculosis! So far my skin tests have been negative (knock on wood) 🙂

 

[musiclink213]

i wasn't there for this, but today in the stockroom, one of the other workers made a bromine volcano in the hood. that wasn't her original plan though.

this one kid in the gen chem lab had to hand in a sample of the copper he was supposed to have, only he didn't have any sample. so what'd he do? instead of borrowing some from someone who had a lot, he decided to find something that looked like what they were handing in. what did he do? opened up a wet tea bag and handed that in.

 

[fpr85]

what did he do? opened up a wet tea bag and handed that in.

did he get away with it?

 

[logos]

We found a chair in our lab that was hot as hell once. Must have had a ton of 32-P droped on it at some point, but from where we had no idea. We had all been sitting in that chair for several hours a day. The gradstudent that discovered how hot it was went home without a shirt on because his shirt got hot from sitting in it.

Luckily the stuff is pretty safe. But its fun to watch new people freak out that we have radioactive stickers everywhere....

 

[lfesiam]

made some chlorine gas by accidently mixing in wrong components in orgo lab... almost knocked myself out.


...ended up fine, my teacher told me to research up on the compound I actually made.