Chromatography Forum

I think I have done just about all of these. Except maybe the phosphates on an MS. The one I'm famous for is to make sure the LC shuts down so my mobile phase doesn't run dry. I have done this so many times that I now know how to prime just about every LC instrument out there and get mobile phase running within about an hour!
I now have a job where i am the sole chromatographer in our entire company. So every bonehead mistake I can blame on something else and nobody knows the difference!

Me? Doing something stupid? Not possible...

Well, my wife and I are driving cars with standard shifts. Unfortunate, the position of the reverse and the first are not coordinated between both cars, and occasionally, while driving her car into or out of a parking spot, I turn my head around, but drive forward. Not a good thing, if you are in a tight spot, as Woody Allen has demonstrated...

Also, I just returned from Ireland, where, as far as I am concerned, one drives on the wrong side of the road, and one sits on the wrong side of the car. On top of that, the windshield wiper is where the old blinker should be. You can't imagine how many times I turned on the wipers before making a turn...

How's this for dumb - I rebuilt an Agilent 1100 binary pump, and while installing the pump head on the pump drive assembly, I over-torqued (by hand) one of the pump assembly screws and snapped the screw mount right off the pump drive assembly. So, that was a fun one to go tell the boss. $1650 for the entire pump drive assembly!

Welll noone can beat this....
Runnning an IEF gel (sorry for not goofing up chromatography!!!) at 2 pm yesterday forgetting to set the timer and it kept running and i come next day dont realise tat and while leaving for home the next day.. i think i have run it today and when i disassemble the gel assembly... i see only leftovers of my gel in pieces... the gel gone...
that is wen i realised there cant be a better fool than me!!!

I started working on an LC ESI MS/MS for the first time, my peaks were very very wide. I was stumped and did everything I could think of with the flow.. pressure .. sample size. I spent close to a week trying to figure out what was going on.
I finally gave up and went and asked my advisor, he looked at it and showed within about 2 min.
Turns out when the line between your column and the MS is about 2 meters long, you will see some very wide peaks. cut it down to a couple of inches and things work much better.

I think every one is too shy about the really stupid stuff, so lets talk about stupid stuff other people has done in the lab.

At Uni the guy in the hood next to me refluxed something with metallic sodium. He looked really funny when cleaning the flask with acetone down the sink!!
The flames stood 1 m high.

We had a Belgian guy called Harry with the Tintin haircut at Uni. The whole first year was taking ether off using the two rotary vaporators in the lab. Harry assured the demonstrator he knew what he was doing, when the two stupid things happened.
1) As the solvent collector was full of ether he decided to empty it, but didn't open the vacuum before yanking it off. Sudden volume change=lots of vapour which flashed on the hotplate.
2) Holding the flask with about 1l of burning ether he shouted "Oh F*** it's on fire!" and threw it onto the floor. The resulting fireball removed his eyebrows and the Tintin quiff, but thankfully no serious injuries.

I was teaching organic one lab There are two nozzles for use, the yellow (vacuum) and the blue (natural) gas. One day I have one of my students walked over (when everyone was filtering off their product) complained that her vacuum system did not work, and she has a major head ache thank goodness no one was using any type of open flame! That same day another student decided to use a 150C thermometer during a reaction that needed 230C. I had just replaced his mercury thermometer.

Similar thing as described Bintang hapened to one of my friends as a student working at research lab.
After reaction with sodium finished, he swirled some hexane in a big flask and made quite a bang in the sink and drainage system. Nobody was hurt, but explosion made spectacular (brown) fountains in the fume hoods (full of equipment) at the oposite wall. My friend had lots of work to clean up all the mess from synthesis eqiopment of older colleagues....

A colleague from that lab told me a story about some girl-student who had to evaporate toluene after synthesis finished. That was older big lab with many partitions between the tables so nobody noticed what she was doing untill some strange black blobs started flying in the air around the lab. When colleagues checked the table they found boiling flask with a small flame on top produsing black smoke in a short bursts. Her explanation was - there was no condenser available and the smell of toluene was terrible...

During polymer synthesis lab in my group a girl used molten alloy bath to heat the flask. At that time we were using mercury thermometers for the controll of the heating. After hour finished and she did all the work all equipment has to be returned to the professor assistant. When astonished assistant with a thermometer in hand asked "and where is the mercury?" girl made most inocent facial expression I ever seen and answered "but there wasn't any before"....

As a teaching assistant for Organic II one of my coworkers was assisting a student with a synthesis project. Who'd have thought that the brown vapor collecting in the roto-vap trap was elemental bromine. . .

Evacuated the lab, boosted all fume hoods and my coworker went to the hospital with minor respiratory burns. Thankfully none of her injuries were serious. On an amusing note, alcohol vapors were the recommended first aid treatment.

I've done my share of stupid things in the lab...here's the most recent thing.

Came in this morning to do some maintenance on my instrument, opened the GC and saw this:



Close-up:



Yes, I left a ruler in there.

I've left a Sharpie in a GC before by mistake - melted Sharpies give off an awful smell, in case you were curious.

John

I've done plenty of stupid stuff, but none of it funny enough to post... I once had a co-worker on second shift with me that was told to clean out some old 8oz sample jars and throw them away. Nothing dangerous in any of the jars, just random raw materials. One had about 4oz of honey in it. Being cold in our lab, the honey wouldn't drain out. So, he grabbed some H2SO4 and poured it in the bottle, because he "knew it would heat up and thin it out." But it wasn't working fast enough for him, so he tries to shake it a little, but nothing happens. "I know: I'll put the lid on and shake it!" That did it, it heated, expanded, and exploded. Luckily, he dropped it as it heated, and was in a hood when it happened. Broken glass with sticky honey-acid mix EVERYWHERE. Including the supervisors hair.

Another co-worker (we only get the best and brightest) once was boiling water in a tray over an open flame for a degradation assay. The water volume gets a little low, and he grabs the wash bottle in the hood. Yeah, it was an acetone bottle, not a water bottle. It flashed all the way back to his hand, the bottle started on fire. A nearby co-worker runs to the other side of the lab (past two fire extinguishers) and grabs a fire extinguisher. As she pulls the pin, she injures her finger. She gets the fire out, and everyone was okay. She wound up going to the doctor for a damaged nerve, and the guy that started the whole thing losses his eyebrows and some of his bangs. He is hence known as "Jesitone".

Yes, I left a ruler in there.
John
:dj:

Yes, but now a dry ruler...

Your wrenches are also dry by now....

Your wrenches are also dry by now....

This is a great way to store your wrenches! There are always there when you need them and they are not as likely to "walk away" Another benefit is that you will not do any GC maintenance until the oven has properly cooled down.

I store capillary column cutters in my GC ovens for that reason.