#i think you've already heard my tales about non-safety-related bad lab conduct

[sukimas]

please share with the class the most novel misadventure in good lab conduct you've had to live through. bureacratic or clerical issues included + bonus points if you're implicated

Once upon a time, there was a trio of research assistants. These research assistants worked with alkali metals in their daily life; they knew quite well, of course, that alkali metals react with water (rapidly and violently) and air (slowly, but the oxide created is explosive.)

These research assistants made some Li-metal batteries to test the durability of a certain polymer material under the electromagnetic and physical stress of being in a battery. They took the batteries that shorted back to the wet lab and opened them up to remove the polymer material and see if it had any notable differences to before it was tested. The disassembly went fine (though they had to use a manual file as using a mechanical one would have possibly created a heat enough to have ignited any lithium oxide that was there.) They removed the polymer material and stored it for safekeeping, but now they had a bunch of lithium metal outside of inert atmosphere.

The oldest research assistant wanted to know where the liquid to store the lithium metal was (as in organic solvents lithium generally won't oxidize.) The middle research assistant had fucking had enough after the filing escapades, and gestured vaguely to the back of the lab. The youngest research assistant figured that they'd go look for some mineral oil, since that's the most commonly used liquid to immerse alkali metals in for safekeeping.

However, when the oldest and youngest research assistants looked around the lab, they saw that the mineral oil was out of reach of both of them. (Neither of them was >165cm, you see, and it was on a high shelf.) However, that was fine. There were other organic solvents in the lab, at a much more reasonable height (in the flammables cabinet.) The oldest research assistant looked through the cabinet, but most of them were not in sealed containers- water might have gotten in. In addition, some of them were less than 99% what they were supposed to be, therefore some of that impurity could be water.

The oldest research assistant pulled out one of the few sealed bottles that was 99.9% pure (HPLC grade). They poured some of the liquid into a beaker- enough to cover all the pieces of lithium metal that remained. The liquid, by the way, was 99.9% pure dry methanol.

The two research assistants carefully placed the lithium metal in the beaker in the fume hood. They then proceeded to immediately slam the fume hood sash down.

You see, dear reader, alkali metals don't just react with water. Though that's what you'll see if you read about them online, they actually just really like to form hydroxides. So if something has an OH group attached to it, alkali metals will react. Oftentimes more rapidly than with water!

The lithium chunks were fizzing, hissing, and skidding around on the surface of the water inside the fume hood. Luckily for us, however- I was the youngest research assistant in this scenario- we were working with lithium, the most electronegative and lightest of the alkali metals. Due to this higher electronegativity, it reacts less rapidly with OH groups than the heavier alkali metals do. So there was no explosion, as fun as that might have been with the sash down. The moral of the story is to use your head about chemical interactions, and don't believe everything you read on university EHS websites.

Anyway, the oldest research assistant is working at one of the top universities in the country now. I wish them all the best.