• Question: Has anything ever gone very very wrong but been really funny at the same time when you've been doing a test on something?

    Asked by anon-173955 to Yewande, Tim, Melanie, Hayley, Carl on 11 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Yewande Oyekenu

      Yewande Oyekenu answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      I remember my first week as a Ph.D. Student. I was asked to sterilize my microscope coverslips by rinsing in ethanol and putting the coverslip into the burning flame. From nowhere my coverslip had caught fire and fallen in the beaker containing the ethanol, next thing was nothing but fire, This was only my first week on a 3-year experimental course. I felt like running away from school. I screamed out and my senior Ph.D. student assisted in putting out the fire. It was caught early. thank Goodness. We all laughed afterward.

    • Photo: Melanie Hannah

      Melanie Hannah answered on 11 Jun 2018:

      In one of the live science shows, I dropped the large flask that was the key demonstration, and we didn’t have a replacement ( a 10 Litre flask full of water, weighs more than 10kg, is slippy and difficult to hold!) The Professor, and the health and safety officer were standing next to me at the time. The only thing to do was laugh, clean up the mess and try and find another one. I have hardly ever felt as foolish though!

    • Photo: Tim Craig

      Tim Craig answered on 12 Jun 2018:

      Our 4×4 broke down on fieldwork once, about 50 miles out from where we were based. We managed to fix it up, but only if we drove at less than about 10 miles an hour – anything faster and (quite literally) part of the bottom fell of the car. Driving back was painfully slow, and we didn’t get back until long after dark – but it started to become so ridiculous, it become pretty funny, watching the reactions we got pottering along so slowly in a big car…

    • Photo: Carl Barford

      Carl Barford answered on 20 Jun 2018:

      WE had some research people walking round a big reactor , wondering why the reaction was not happening, checking dials and machines and tapping things. Eventually, one of them tripped up over the drum of chemical they had forgotten to add. We laughed, they looked very embarrassed

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