of twig and bone @oftwigandbone - Tumblr Blog

Intro post

Hi! I'm a first year clinical herbalism student residing in Quebec. This blog is somewhere I can talk about my journey as a student and share my thoughts and explorations with the plants.

I'm also part of the queer community!

#introduction

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

I have had a really full and busy day today, but the highlight was:

So I'm sitting in the staff work area and one of my colleagues comes up to me. There's an open day this weekend, and so we need to plan an activity for the would-be students.

"Simple!" I say. "Let's get them to dissect some owl pellets. Hands on, fun, they get to play with skulls."

"Good idea!" she says. "But we'll need something even fancier for the open day in February. What can we do? Perhaps we can take some soil samples."

And as we're debating the photogenic merits of soil Vs dead mice...

Suddenly, a Dashing and Handsome Stranger (read: an autistic engineering lecturer) appears with a flourish (read: launches himself into a seat beside us while visibly and physically vibrating with excitement about his special interest being Useful) and asks "HELLO I'M SORRY DID YOU SAY SOIL BECAUSE I HAVE A RAMAN MICROSCOPE"

"Amazing!" declares my colleague. "...Who are you?"

"COME AND SEE IT!!!" he says, currently the human embodiment of the :D emoticon.

We went and saw it. It's an excellent microscope and his ten minute infodump about it was both spectacular and also extremely useful. We're going to use it to assess microplastics.

I have a new friend.

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

Guess who I saw again today! I say 'saw', he hunted me down to invite me to train on using his microscopes - it turned out some of the engineers asked if they could look at explosive substances with it and he was like NO YOU MAY NOT IT'S POWERED BY A LASER so now he's insisting that everyone train on it, but wanted to ask me if I'd like to do it. Obviously I have said yes. He's getting an SEN as well so he's put my name down for that, too.

And then we compared notes on working in labs, and he told me about the time he was sent to the 'chemical cupboard' in his last lab and found a Tesco bag of asbestos, three and a half kilos of TNT, and half a pint of cyanide, and when he told the health and safety woman she just said he should use a lone working protocol, and he was so angry he yelled A LONE WORKING PROTOCOL WILL NOT SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM A DIRTY BOMB, CAROLINE

I love this man

shotgunfullofbabies

Why did the chemical cupboard have three and a half kilos of trinitrotolulene (the full name for TNT, for those unaware), and was it at the very least an explosives cupboard?

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

It was not in an explosives cupboard, and he didn't know. Basically this was in an HE building being converted over to a young offenders institute, and for whatever reason, all the science teachers quit en masse as the switch was happening, leaving all their students in the lurch. So one morning he came into work, was told he was being promoted to Technical Demonstrator, given a Bunch of Mysterious Keys, and told he had three hours to familiarise himself with the contents of the chemical cupboard.

"Great," he said. "Where is the chemical cupboard?"

"Shrug emoji," his boss said gravely, and wandered off to have crisps.

So he spent an hour wandering the building and trying his keys in every lock before finally finding a door that opened, and upon finally opening it, was immediately greeted by a Tesco carrier bag on the floor labelled 'Asbestos, do not touch'.

"Right-o," he thought. "No touching that."

But then he had two hours left to familiarise himself with the packed shelf contents of quite a large room, and the problem is that when you tell an autistic lab tech to familiarise themselves with a room full of chemicals, what they hear is not "Have a quick look so you have an idea of what's there", it's "These chemicals must be catalogued in detail and also here have a time pressure," so he was going to be both Thorough and Grumpy about this. And this room was packed.

The oldest bottle he found was a reagent opened in 1959.

It had crystallised.

("It was quite beautiful, actually," he told me dreamily. "A work of art. I wish I'd kept it.")

The cyanide, when he finally found it, was in a stoppered glass vial. So that was the point he lost his shit and went and grabbed Caroline.

The kicker is, Caroline didn't care. She insisted they didn't have the money or resources to spare on getting rid of it. So he had to march all the way to the Dean's office.

"You look like you're having a bad day," she said warily.

"Well I thought it would peak with the Tesco carrier bag of asbestos I found," he said, "but I was very wrong."

And that's how you give your boss a heart attack.

arsnof

I'm assuming the stoppered vial had a tiny but detailed drawing of a skull on a square of paper barely adhering to the glass?

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

Of course! Lab safety