|
sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
|
The Quantitative, Analytical Demon
I just finished with the dreaded quant lab check in. So now I will take the time to tell you three things that you might find interesting about quant lab check-in. Why? Why, because Sublingua�s just that kind of girl. What kind of girl? Well, the kind of girl who has forty-five minutes to kill until she has to go and meet with her professor. So here are three things that you might find interesting about quant lab check-in: First: Okay, it�s not so dreaded, just tedious. You get to hear everything you've heard in every lab you've ever taken ever. Wear clothing. Don't spill things. Don't set yourself on fire. Blah. Blah. Blah. It's like those safety directions that the flight attendants go through on each and every flight that you pretend that you are too cool to listen to even though in the unlikely event of a whatever, they could, you know, save your life. Or whatever. Second: Inspecting a lab drawer full of glassware has never broken into the top ten on my list of things that I would do if I only had six months to live. Or even the top one hundred. Or even the top one thousand. Or even--well, you get the idea. Third: At least the quant lab has done away with the truly dreaded lab safety video. That thing was laff-a-minit for all of its gorgeous twenty-five or so minutes. It was a real "I know, gang! We'll put on a show in the barn!" kind of production. Like if they let all those drama geeks and theater majors in conjunction with all those AV nerds produce a safety video? They'd come up with something that would very, very closely resemble this video--if not this actual video itself. I'd tell you all about it in great detail, but TheBrain informs me that this is decidedly Not An Acceptable Thing To Do. So I will only break rank to tell you about my favorite part of the video: There are emergency showers in each of the labs. (In case you're not a lab baby, you should know that emergency showers are basically these open-air kind of waterfalls that are to be used when you, say, splash your entire body with some chemical designed to dissolve entire bodies in relatively short periods of time. And don�t laugh, those kinds of chemicals exist. Just ask Jeffery Dahmer. But telling you that leads me to the dreaded story within a story: One time, when I was working in the lab with The Chinese, during a routine inspection of the lab by the Official Safety Officials, the emergency showers were tested much to the amusement of The Chinese scientists, who rather charmingly knew not the first thing about this rather important bit of safety equipment. �What is that?� they asked me. �Is waste water?�) Wait. What was I telling you? Oh, right. The safety video. So my favorite part is where this theater major�a species which should not have been in the lab in the first goddamned place�splashes himself with some well-faked chemical (water with blue food coloring in it or something) and the narrator drones: �If you splash yourself with a large amount of a chemical solution, you should blah, blah, blah safety shower. You must remove all your clothes. Don�t worry. Your instructor will clear the room.� So Theater Major splashes himself and runs over to the safety shower, where one of his labmates ever so helpfully pulls the handle of the safety shower. The camera cuts from Theater Major to Helpful Labmate. And while the narrator drones on about how this experience will be awfully like bathing in the privacy of your own bathroom, Helpful Labmate stands there, ogling, but ogling Theater Major. I�m talking major Elevator Eyes. I�m talking, like, Helpful Labmate�s eyeballs were showing signs of serious dryness, maybe even cracking. And this continues even while wet clothing is shown being tossed ever so suggestively off to the side. Man, that video was a drinking game waiting to happen. And finally, something that doesn�t have anything to do with quant lab check-in: I think I'm getting sick. I feel like merde. I�m tired and have that dried out feeling in my sinuses that usually precede the other symptoms: the fever, the aches, the chills, the whining. (Especially the whining. Man, I love being sick.) Also? From the Learn From My Mistakes File: You shouldn�t try to actually use sugar-free Power Bars as your only source of nutrition. This is not a good idea. You should try to combine them with some coffee at least. Or maybe with some cardboard for the fiber.
More lies:
|
|||||