Story Time:
Before I quit working in my lab at Duke, my boss hired a new undergraduate to pick up some of the slack in our lab. I may not have been terribly impressive, but my ignorance paled in comparison to our newest undergraduate. My presumptive replacement had little acumen for working in a lab environment, showed minimal incentive to learn, and displayed even less common sense. I was responsible for training her, all the while fighting the constant urge to knock a hole in her head to let some brains in.
On one occasion, I asked the undergraduate- we’ll call her Katrina, after the hurricane- to gather and wash everyone’s lab coats. It was a simple job, one that didn’t require her to get her hands dirty. Our lab employed a cleaning service that would pick up the coats and return them the next day; all she needed to do was gather the garments and place them in the hall for collection. I had explained this to her a week before, so I had few qualms about assigning her the task and returning to viewing internet pornography and other important matters of science.
It was only after half an hour had elapsed with no sign of Katrina did I begin to become worried. In her few short months in the lab, Katrina had done some questionable things: spilling ethidium bromide (a rather toxic substance) on herself, freaking out and attempting to activate the emergency shower when we told her it was a mutagen, and a separate incident involving a freezer burn and a sensitive portion of the human anatomy. Still, how could you screw this up?
Just as I was about to lumber out of my chair to investigate, Katrina turned up. “Noah, I’m having a problem with the washing machine,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It won’t turn off. I tried everything.”
We didn’t have a washing machine.
“Show me the problem,” I said carefully.
Katrina led me down the hall to the room where we did molecular biology. “There,” she said, pointing. In the middle of the room, our large ultracentrifuge was running at near full speed.
Let’s pause for a moment to compare an ultracentrifuge to a washing machine:
One looks like a $100,000 piece of scientific equipment for collecting microscopic particle of matter. The other looks like a washing machine.
And something was definitely wrong with the ultracentrifuge; the machine was emitting a high, unhealthy whine. I suddenly felt like Han Solo when he first spots the Death Star.
“That’s no washing machine!” I yelled, racing across the room and yanking the plug. As the machine wound down, I turned to Katrina, picturing us both getting fired for destroying a $100,000 machine in perhaps the dumbest incident in the history of modern science. “Please, please, please tell me you didn’t put anything in here,” I begged.
Katrina’s look told me all I needed to know. The machine chuffed a final time and wheezed to a stop. I cracked the door, and an acrid stench wafted out of the main chamber. No less than half a dozen lab coats had been stuffed en masse into the gaping maw of the machine. They were soaked in detergent (I had no idea where she even found this). According to the timer, the machine had been running at 50,000 Gs for almost 12 minutes. The rotor had been removed, and the threads of the central shaft had snared several of the lab coats, wrapping them around the rapidly spinning crank arm.
Friction + Natural Fiber = Fire.
This suspicion was confirmed when a wafting bit of smoke curled up from the still-smoldering remains of the pile of soapy, highly flammable lab coats. True to form, Katrina took this as an opportunity to press the panic button, fleeing and yelling fire, but succeeding only in hastening the spreading of word of our idiocy.
As I look down again, the smoldering pile of ruined coat decides to make a go of it, and puffs into a lazy, halfhearted flame. I considered peeing on the fire to put it out, but settled on using phosphate-buffered saline, an equally salty liquid of similar acidity.
As I quenched the flames, a still-panicked Katrina, having completed a circuit of the building where she advertised her idiocy, returned, accompanied by several worried bystanders.
“Hey, Katrina,” I asked her, “just out of curiosity, which machine were you planning on sticking these into to dry them?”
The story has a happy ending. Amazingly, the centrifuge recovered with few signs of injury. Katrina discovered that her true calling was elsewhere. She now decorates cakes for a living. Most importantly, I was not fired prematurely for failing to use a child leash on an incompetent employee. We even washed the lab coats, losing only two to the conflagration.
You might say we all got away clean.