Chromatography Forum

How about

"Things that you don't want to hear in a chromatography lab."

For example - "Bang!"
or "did you have any more of that sample?"

Or, "Things that you don't want to hear again in a chromatography lab." for true ones. e.g.

"It's a great thing, this chromatology"

" We're moving you to a smaller lab - can you stack the GCs?"

"I thought that you just pushed the GC into the toothpaste and it read the level of fluorine"

Cheers,

Ralph

"Does this rag smell like chloroform?"

"Oops - I've spilled the heptafluorobutyric acid."

"Oops - I've spilled the heptafluorobutyric acid."

I think any "oops" could be bad in a lab....

"Hey, you know what phosphine smells like; come over here and sniff this."

So, your "friend" would like to know if there is any chance that a blood alcohol analysis could be wrong?

We had one last year. A student came to me and asked "Do you know if chloroform and nitric acid can be mixed? Because when I mixed them the waste container started expanding.. Is it bad?"

Seems this mix creats phosgen... luckly the wastecontainer was in a fumehood when it ruptured!! Otherwise we would probably have had the local authorities asking some questions...

This is a genuine one from years ago at my place of employment,

Question
"How come that window is so etched and cloudy?"

Answer
"Don't worry that was when we spilt some anhydrous HF last week"

No wonder I swapped from chemistry to analysis.

GCguy

Fun with jets:

Once in a biology lab, people were flame sterilizing tweezers (dip in a sm. beaker MeOH, pass through flame of an alcohol lamp, MeOH burns off is a second or two).

A TA noticed that one of the many sm. beakers was about empty. He failed to notice that it was the only nearly empty one, failed to ask himself why it might be the only empty one, failed to remember that MeOH flames have no color... He decided to refill it from a 1L flask of MeOH. There was a dinner plate sized black spot on the wall opposite where he started to pour into the beaker as the flame shot up the stream and jetted 3 feet to the wall when it hit the MeOH saturated vapor at the opening of the flask.

(nobody was injured)

Then there was the time I was student teaching and I wanted to do the self-inflating balloon demo.
I added some calcium carbide chips and water to a balloon, tied it off and clamped it to the top of a ring stand several yards from anything.
Once the balloon was inflated, I lit a match that I had taped to the end of a yard stick so that I could detonate the gas in the balloon.
Instead of popping and exploding, the balloon developed a pinhole and broke loose from the clamp. It did one short lap around the center of the room before heading for the curtains at the head of a 2 foot flame. Fortunately, it ran out of gas just before it got to the window. I made a note to limit that demo to open, muddy fields in the future.

Nice one. It reminds me - place a calcium carbide chip in an injection port and you have a way of detecting water with an FID.

"Hey, we're introducing this new quality system - it won't take up any extra time"

Ralph

In a 6th form class!

One long haired girl to another over a bunsen:

"Oy Jen burn your hair it really stinks"

They didnt have scissors.

Couple more true ones

1. "Can you sample a haunted Tudor mansion and analyse by GCMS for ghosts? Apparently there is an odour associated with them"

I'm already ahead of you on the spectral library jokes! - and on the odour!

2. " We've had this GC for about a year and the performance is going off. The peaks are getting smaller and taking longer to come out" .

Have you tried changing the septum?

"Never"

Cheers,

Ralph

'where's that leak coming from?' is perhaps the thing you least want to hear arriving at work in the morning...

The best folklore lab incident from the places I've worked is of a guy who got his waste container labelling confused and used a waste container with toluene in for disposal of his conc. nitric acid. Left in a warm lab over the weekend it formed TNT and exploded embedding the door of the solvent cupboard into the opposite wall. Following this he was promoted sideways out of the lab and given the job of IT development expert.

The best folklore lab incident from the places I've worked is of a guy who got his waste container labelling confused and used a waste container with toluene in for disposal of his conc. nitric acid. Left in a warm lab over the weekend it formed TNT and exploded embedding the door of the solvent cupboard into the opposite wall. Following this he was promoted sideways out of the lab and given the job of IT development expert.

In a completly different department (in no way related to my self, honestly I swear ) an old bottle of ether had been forgotten in the back of a cupboard... A few years ago when people met at work they thought that the lab had been vandalised because the place was a wreck. Turns out the bottle had formed peroxides and decided to explode.. They found the bottlecap + bottleneck in a big hole in the ceiling.. I would have loved to see that happen.. possible behind a thick armoured glas wall

Going back to the original thread:

- colleagues who think that if you can't detect any analyte then the concentration in the sample must be "zero" or similar type assumptions.

I once heard from an engineer about a gas cylinder that got dropped near the water's edge and ruptured. It sped through the water like a torpedo. I guess it might have been a scuba type tank.