What's the dumbest, most outrageous, most absurd thing your lab partner has done?

Strictly irrelevent, since this was at primary school araound '77 or '78. We had a supply teacher who should have retired centuries previously who told us that in order to prepare us for secondary school, where there will be lots of nasty chemicals, he wanted us to sniff them so that we would recognise them when we came across them again, know they were dangerous and avoid them.

What could possibly go wrong!

He had us line up and gently waft chloroform, ether and other such chemicals up our noses. Of course, we were going to inhale as deeply as we could. What happened next was a bit vague, but I was told afterwards that a whole load of parents were phoned up and asked to ferry their children and their friends home in cars (getting us out of the classroom and down the stairs must have been fun), and also, we never saw that teacher again.

...the 70s were crazy :lolwut:

Reply 61

Helloworld_95

19

I'm usually the one doing the absurd stuff :P I remember in one of my A level Chemistry ISAs I left some corked test tubes rather close to a bunsen burner, yeah those corks shot right across the room making a nice popping sound in the process.

Reply 62

Nuclear Ghost

OP

14

Well, folks, I've loved all your stories, but something that happened just yesterday takes the cake. But no, it's not my lab PARTNER, it's my lab DEMONSTRATOR.
I do the usual procedure, follow the instructions I was given to the letter. I make a plot on the computer and print it out, from which I derive a quantity. My quantity is not what theory predicted, so I ask the demonstrator what may have gone wrong. He tells me my plot is inaccurate, which makes perfect sense, as an ideal fit was made by the computer, which was designed to make the plot as accurate as possible. Nevertheless, he tells me to change my function, eventually forcing me to do so to make the "ideal graph", and surprise, surprise, the result of doing so makes a tangent from the data as big as the tangent from my query.
After something like half an hour trying to tell him that he's being ridiculous, he says something completely different. He tells me to measure the resistance of my entire circuit, piece by piece. Turns out it is such that there is no justifiable way to conduct the experiment anyway. No wonder my quantity was so different from prediction; the experiment was fundamentally flawed. But no, says the demonstrator, it was all my fault for reasons known only to him.
Me and my partner just left early after that, talking and laughing about how ludicrous lab is.

Reply 63

BWV1007

14

Original post by Nuclear Ghost

Well, folks, I've loved all your stories, but something that happened just yesterday takes the cake. But no, it's not my lab PARTNER, it's my lab DEMONSTRATOR.
I do the usual procedure, follow the instructions I was given to the letter. I make a plot on the computer and print it out, from which I derive a quantity. My quantity is not what theory predicted, so I ask the demonstrator what may have gone wrong. He tells me my plot is inaccurate, which makes perfect sense, as an ideal fit was made by the computer, which was designed to make the plot as accurate as possible. Nevertheless, he tells me to change my function, eventually forcing me to do so to make the "ideal graph", and surprise, surprise, the result of doing so makes a tangent from the data as big as the tangent from my query.
After something like half an hour trying to tell him that he's being ridiculous, he says something completely different. He tells me to measure the resistance of my entire circuit, piece by piece. Turns out it is such that there is no justifiable way to conduct the experiment anyway. No wonder my quantity was so different from prediction; the experiment was fundamentally flawed. But no, says the demonstrator, it was all my fault for reasons known only to him.
Me and my partner just left early after that, talking and laughing about how ludicrous lab is.