Hello again!
This next post is another addition to what seems to now be a long line of posts about completely random things. This might be the sign that. with Parents’ Evening on Thursday and lack of work to get on with, I’m starting to run out of really random stuff, so should just do my infamous albums post. However, for some reason, all of these posts seem to do much better than my reviews…so here we go!
I am currently studying A-Levels in Biology and Chemistry, so I am no stranger to conducting practical investigations in class. In addition to this, especially regarding Chemistry, I am used to dealing with substances contained in scary looking bottles, displaying signs such as “Toxic” or “Corrosive”, or other words which can strike fear into anybody who is easily scared by a bottle of chemicals.
Today, I was conducting a titration using a couple of rather nasty chemicals, including an acid solution which I had prepared a few days before, so quite frankly it could have been seething with awful compounds from god-knows-where. And of course, when dealing with these substances, protection is fundamental. At school, this doesn’t normally extend beyond lab coat and safety goggles.
The lab coat, of course, is essential for keeping these substances away from one’s clothes, because who knows how you get bright pink phenolphthalein indicator out of a blazer? However, in addition to keeping the blazer and front clean of corrosion, lab coats are also extremely helpful in keeping the arms safe. Given the fact that all sorts of beakers and burettes and pipettes, containing these substances, are manoeuvred by the hands, surely it would be logical to suggest that if any part of the body is going to be touched by a spillage, it would be the hands and lower arms? It would seem surprising that hands are left uncovered, at least at my school. But in the end, all you need is a load of running water over your hand to sort that out. The lower arms, however, are a bit more of an issue, rather surprisingly. It would be reasonable, initially, to suggest that the lower arms would be covered by the sleeves of the lab coat, right? However, this assumption has not been received so well from some others, and this has led to what, in my opinion, is one of the most confusing, obscure, unnecessary profanities of recent times.
Short sleeved lab coats.
I have a feeling that, to some of you, this may be a bit of an anticlimax, given the 400-word build-up which, for some reason, you have probably read. Not for me though. When faced with the realisation that, having retrieved my goggles, the only lab coats left were the kind that left your shirt sleeves naked, cold and exposed like some sort of wild animal, I almost burst out into tears. I ended up conducting the experiment (which involved six titrations instead of the minimum of three) trembling in fear that I might over pour 1.00M sodium hydroxide into the funnel, leading to a deadly overflow of alkaline solution onto my shaking arms. Probably why I had to repeat the experiment five more times…
The thing that strikes me most about short sleeved lab coats is that, other than the sleeve issue, they aren’t different at all to logical, reasonably, long sleeved lab coats. They’re made of the same material. They all reach the same point on my knee. Yet the long sleeved model is so much more functional than the other. It’s as if they looked at the long sleeved model and said “Why don’t we supply this school with half long sleeved and half short sleeved lab coats? Then we can watch as the A-Level students squabble over the long sleeved ones, and the weakest of the class will be at the evolutionary disadvantage of short sleeved lab coats! Suckers!”
Imagine if an aeroplane company decided to just cut half of each wing off? It’s the same scenario! In both cases, something fundamental to the object’s usage is being removed for, seemingly, no apparent reason. And the removed chunk is most likely just thrown away, without finishing what it was started to achieve. Would you go on an aeroplane like that? Of course not. So why should we be expected to wear lab coats like this? This is what is wrong with our society today. This is what keeps me awake at night.
Anyway, that’s my stint of complete and utter madness done for today. Tune in tomorrow, where I’ll probably come up with something even more irrelevant.
Goodnight!
My Factless Autobiography 