Mar 11, 2010

Late nights in lab

So normally I am prety casual about staying back in the lab to finish some work. Most of the time I have done enough during the day to not really need to stay back and pound through another experiment. However, sometimes, when I am slack or stupid I find myself back in the lab in the dark pushing litres of solvent through a column. 

That was the story last night, but fortunately, for some reason a lot of my workmates were keen to work back late too. So, after the new girl T broke a few pieces of glassware and had had no luck with her experiment we decided it was time to crank up the angry oldskool neu-metal and have a bit of angry lab time.

Needless to say, it didn't last long, I was getting pestered to finish up because I was really late getting home and T and P both wanted to finish the reaction up. So, when my lift arrived it was pretty late and I was just finished with my column. 

I seriously hate late nights in the lab. To me there is always some sort of fear that if something goes wrong noone will be around to mop you up off the floor till the next morning. Hopefully, I won't have to go through that too many more times in my PhD.

3 comments:

  1. Looks like we all stayed back last night. I was on the other side of town in a HPLC lab, collecting 7 separate fractions (any of which could be my natural products), and then rotavapping all 7 MeOH/water mixtures down... All alone in a foreign lab, although the rotavapping part was probably the most dangerous part of it all, lol

    ReplyDelete
  2. I wouldn't mind setting up overnight reaction but wow, I hate staying in the lab after 7pm especially because I haven't finish FCC.. without sand :(

    ReplyDelete