Chemistry Burn.

Yeah. This happened to my arm on Tuesday morning in my organic chemistry lab. It was basically the easiest lab of the term, but my partner and I somehow had more trouble on this lab than any of the other ones. Basically all we had to do was boil some instant milk, add some acid a couple of times and then remove any chunks that formed. Simple right? Well not for us.

The first time we boiled our milk and added the acid, we ended up cooking it for too long or something because we got an enormous amount of congealed milk chunkage with not enough liquid left over to extract the next substance. We asked our TA what our problem was and he was like. "Hmmm. I don't know what you guys did wrong, but you have to do it again." So that's what we did. However, this is when the most disastrous episode of the day occured, namely my poor burnt arm.

We were successful in the first and second extractions of milk chunkage, but as we were removing the remaining liquid from our hot plate to cool, disaster struck. As I was removing our precious beaker, my partner moved the hotplate and it touched my wrist. Oh no! I kind of screamed and dropped the beaker. It shattered on our lab bench and our precious milk liquid mixture spilled all over. It was terrible. Then, all the TA's and our professor rushed over to make sure we didn't spill anything dangerous like hydrochloric acid or something. (luckily, we had just finished adding some sodium bicarbonate to our liquid, effectively neutralizing the hydrochloric acid that we had previously added...) But needless to say, it was pretty embarrasing. Everyone heard my funny scream and the shatter of our poor beaker. It an especially sad day because we had previously dominated every other lab. But oh well. Nobody's prefect I guess...

So, in the end we were unable to successfully complete the experiment and were forced to use the data of the group directly across from us. That being said, they are not quite as good at doing labs as we are, so I hope they ended up making a good milk liquid mixture. We will find out next week I guess... And I hope I get a really cool scar. I could tell everyone how I got it one day in organic chemistry lab. And it would be amazing.