I labeled this semester as my most demanding after that day he announced what the requirements are for Chem 31.1 - Organic Chemistry Laboratory. The pre-laboratory reports for each experiment were to include a schematic diagram of the procedure, sketches of the special set-ups and a table of reagents and products involved in the experiment. The table of reagents should also include the physical properties, hazards and first aid in case you get dumb and ingest the chemical. And everything should be handwritten.
Funny it is that everytime I do the hazards column, I encounter words like "poison!", "carcinogenic!", "causes burns on any area of contact", "fatal if inhaled", or "skin irritant". Wooot. Sometimes I would just smile involuntarily and think, "Yeah, they do want us to die not just in academics but with chemicals." And the sense of the hazards column? To make us extra extra careful since life might slip out of our hands any minute or make our hands shiver while holding the test tube and eventually, drop it.
Due to laziness and all, I summarized my First Aid column with:
skin contact: wash with soap and plenty of water.
eye contact: wash with plenty of water.
ingestion: drink plenty of water; induce/don't induce vomiting.
inhalation: move to more ventilated area.
Isn't that relieving that the solution for contact with carcinogenic chemicals is just water? Of course, not. But the MSDS's said so, so I wrote that about a hundred times for all chemicals, ommiting all other first aid measures, not bothering I might die because of improper first aids.
But here, I'm alive and has just finished the last prelab for the whole semester (and looking forward to another bunch of prelabs for Chem 28.1).
Everything in Chem31.1 will be over. The scorching hot laboratory, huge set-ups I thought I would only see in sci-fi movies and a moody professor will be all gone. But still, I'm going to miss the lab - because of it is the most techie lab in whole Institute of Chemistry and newest-looking. And! And! And! The most enjoyable classmates I've ever had in all of my classes. And, sadly, I won't (almost) have them anymore. I know it sounds cheesy but "I'm going to miss you."
Insert: One time, we used pyridine as a catalyst for synthesis of something. I have this habit of smelling chemicals for presence of traces of something. So I stuck my nose out on all used glasswares to know if pyridine was still there and wash it. Consequently, I might have inhaled huge amounts of pyridine. The next meeting, I discovered that pyridine can cause impotency for males once introduced to the body. Shit. And my heart was palitating terribly for the whole afternoon. I was awed not for myself but for the world: How can the world be a better place without my descendants? MY GENES!
Ohhh. I still wish that pyridine impotency was not really proven to be right.
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