Last week, the chairman of my company walked into my office and handed me 4 tickets to last night’s Yankee game. Sweet! Box seats, right by the 3rd base dugout. Paid parking. Stadium Club passes. And of course … I had lab. That’s what I get for saying how much fun I had last week. The Evil Forces are once again focused on me.
I gave the tix to Deb, Jack, my sister and Mr. Ragu so that they may go and have a good time for me. As much as I enjoy my orgo lab, I would have preferred to have been at a Yankee game, even if they lost. Especially last night.
My lab partner brought my threshold of patience to a whole new level. She could not read a thermometer. She could not figure out how to plug in a heating mantle. And ... she’s a bigger disaster than me.
Generally when I hear glass shattering in the lab, it’s almost always her. She is the reason why most university lab equipment is made of Pyrex. Last night, for some reason that only made sense to her, she decided to poke one of my flasks, which was delicately attached to my apparatus and while she asked me the inane “How did you get this thingy on there?” No sooner did the words spill out of her mouth, the flask came crashing down all over my lab bench. (It was not made of Pyrex.) I sighed and remarked “Well, that’s a moot question now, isn’t it?”
I cleaned up the broken shards of glass and refrained from forcing them down her throat, (the lab assistant was watching), and quickly set up a new flask just in time for my professor to wander over to check on my experiment. He’s one of those people who like to fuss with equipment. I don’t mind, as he has been paying a lot of attention to me in lab (general chit chat – we’re the same age, and I think the “kids” make him nuts). So when he decided to adjust the hose that was attached to the water source, I was glad to stand back and let him putter. Especially the 3 seconds just after he adjusted the water hose when I had a fountain of water spraying all over my lab bench. And him. And my lab partner, who just had to stick her nose in to see how you stick a hose onto a nozzle.

Ha.