[ Living In The Fairytale ]

Thursday, December 08, 2005

Hilarious Happenings

Went into the lab this morning to find that ALL 4 VALVES in the stupid myograph machine were jammed and couldn't empty. Seriously, if DMT (the myograph manufacturer) were to ask me for a product evaluation, I would rate it a -10 from a scale of 0 to 100. =P I tell you, that machine is utterly frustrating and drives us all crazy. I only managed to unclog it at the end of the day, when all our experiments had been done.

The carbogen gas cylinder is another tricky one. The supervisor taught us how to operate it three times already but each time we need to turn it off/on, we go, "So which knob do we turn first huh?" Today we tried to turn it off by ourselves unsuccessfully, so we asked Yiwen to help us out. While she was turning one of the knobs, we heard a sudden explosion and everyone thought the tubing exploded again. That was until we saw plumes of smoke rising from the (new!) centrifuge, black debris all over the lab bench and Yiwen's horrified expression (because she was the one operating it). Zi hui, Agnes and I had to run out of the lab to laugh because the whole scenario was just so hilarious! Haha! (And of course looking at our supervisor's perplexed expression - I think he sorely regrets taking us in for our research projects since his equipment has been breaking down or malfunctioning ever since we got in.)

But that's not the only thing that's exploded in his lab so far. I heard from Zi hui that the gas tank for gassing the rabbits exploded the first time he used it because apparently he forgot to open the outlet for the gas to escape. Then the tubing connected to the gas cylinder exploded when they turned the knob too quickly. Thankfully these explosions happened last week when I hadn't yet joined the lab, and the explosion today was quite minor and I was far away from the site. Lucky the smoke didn't set off the fire alarm and sprinklers. =)

Now I'm a little worried about my evaluation for BS901.

In The Fairyland On|9:41 PM|