(A continuation from Christian's experience with the Polish coffee ladies (see comments on the first part of this blog) but I couldn't add it as a comment on that blog, I just kept getting error messages - perhaps it exceds some sort of size limit for "Comments"?)

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Good choice Christian! Because apart from the less harmful nature of acetone, it's volatility would mean that any residue would be unlikely to last long in the vicinity of a warm coffee maker. That is assuming that no-one had used a beaker for something other than what was written on the label . . . ? - I have seen wash bottles labelled "water" filled with industrial alcohol, and unlabelled beakers of brown liquid left unattended on a lab bench. Those turned out to contain bromoform and di-iodomethane, fortunately easy to distinguish from sherry by their smell!

I have had some other "unknown nasties in labs" occasions which occurred when moving sites. (Including from those labs where we had the lively Christmas party described above).

I was clearing out some old cupboards under benches, and at the back, covered in dust, were some small bottles, one with a faded label on which I could just make out "Ni****nzene", which didn't mean much to me at all as my organic chemistry knowledge was (and still is) minimal, and one labelled "phenol di-iodo arsine", which didn't sound very nice to me, so I took them along to our safety officer who promptly locked them in the secure "Highly Toxic" cabinet pending safe disposal, as they are considered so hazardous that we were not even authorised to hold them in our class of laboratory! The "Ni*..." unknown was nitrobenzene (highly carcinogenic), and it and the "phenol di-iodo arsine" (causes severe burns and blistering; toxic by ingestion, skin absorption, inhalation of vapour) were both used as refractive index liquids.

In another lab, I found some old brown glass-stoppered bottles (~ 1 litre size). These had thick crusts of white and yellow efflorescence around the stoppers, running down the sides, and around the bases on the old porcelain photographic paper-developing dish they were standing in. They were simply labelled "Clerici's solution" on a handwritten paper label - nothing more; no "Toxic", or skull-&-crossbones labels. Neither I, nor anyone else around at the time had heard of it. Fortunately no-one touched them until we had found out what it was!

Not only would the weight have been so surprising we might have dropped them if we'd tried to lift them onto the bench (over 4 kg per bottle), but for those who don't know what "Clerici's solution" is, it's a heavy liquid used in mineral separation, an aqueous solution of the malonate and formate salts of thalluim, and the efflorescence consisted of a mixture of those salts! Thallium being one of the most toxic heavy metals, I wasn't taking chances with such a large quantity of souble organic Tl compounds. I wore gloves and a face mask to lift them into a container on a large trolley, which was then preceded by an escorting lab assistant as I moved them across the car park to to the "hazardous materials for disposal" store.

Oh yes, whilst I am on "Happy Memories", one more;

One X-ray lab I worked in (the site of the "green specks & sandwiches" episode) had been specially built with totally OTT screening, and with complete disregard for the concept of scattering and the inverse-square law. It had thick barite-rich plaster on the walls and a heavy steel sliding door (no hinges would have carried it), but almost no ventilation, supposedly to protect the adjacent office area from stray radiation. (What about those working IN the lab??? - which of course got so unbearably hot with it's 30kV X-ray generator and no air con. that I almost never closed that heavy door). My desk was in that office, and amongst the "ornamental specimens" there was a large massive lump of a very dense black mineral (unlabelled), inherited from a former occupant. No-one knew what it was, and as it wasn't very inspiring to look at, and had no locality info, no-one had bothered to try and identify it. It had just become part of the furniture, one of those odd specimens, used variously as a paper-weight, doorstop etc, and most of us almost forgot it was there.

At the time we were about to leave that building and move to a new site, it had spent most of the previous couple of years on the window sill next to my desk. When we were at the "take it or chuck it?" stage of packing everything up, we decided to check the id's of the various ornamental unknown specimens to see whether any of them was worth keeping.

That doorstop sent the geiger counter off scale: it was solid uraninite. If the barite walls did anything at all, it was protecting me from that rather hot piece of uraninite whilst I was in the lab, rather than any X-rays when I was in the office, because apart from when I was doing open-beam X-ray work (e.g. aligning a Debye-Scherrer camera) my radiation exposure levels were probably lower in the X-ray lab than in the office!

All the above was over 20 years ago, and, like Christian, I'm still here.

Pete N.

PS: Apologies to those who may have read some of this before. I know I have mentioned at least the occasion with the phenol di-iodo arsine, and the uraninite doorstop story on posts on various threads many moons ago, but now we have this blog feature, it seemed apposite to write them up again here, in this context, and for the record.

PPS I can see how blogging can become addictive - I must sign off soon, I do have some other business to attend to!

P.

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