I’m going to test out that saying this month. While I was setting up four tests a couple weeks ago, I set my plastic beakers on the stirrer/hotplates to mix the ingredients together. It seems that on the last one, I turned on the heat rather than the stirrer. (Oops!) I went about making up the rest of the test materials. I casually looked over to see if all of the salts had dissolved and saw one beaker was much shorter than the rest and leaning at a 30 degree angle.
I quickly removed it and the water spilled out of the very new hole I created at the bottom of the beaker. Nothing terrible happened, (except I had to remake the formula) and it would have ended there, but dummy Mike decided to give a blow by blow description of the event the next day at lunch. Our safety officer was sitting with us. So now I’m going to be featured in this month’s safety talk! One more step toward becoming famous will be taken.
Ha! At last! Someone has taken my place in hot plate safety!
(In every lab, at some point, I caught something on because I walked away from the bench “for just a minute” while multi-tasking.)
My last incident involved heating up a beaker of ethanol….