| Mistake | Check the mistakes you have made | Number of rookies who have done this
|
|---|
| Used latex gloves while washing glassware with soap - glassware goes flying around the sink
| | 20
|
| Pick up something from the floor and while doing so, dropping the contents out of the front pocket of your lab-coat (usually NMR tubes)
| | 19
|
| Forgot to pre-weigh your round bottom flask.
| | 16
|
| Forgot to add the phenolphthalein before starting the titration.
| | 15
|
| Handeled volitile, smelly and/or toxic solvents or reagents (benzene, carbon disulfide, acrylates, etc.) outside of the fume hood.
| | 10
|
| believed that combinatorial chemistry and would revolutionize drug discovery
| | 9
|
| Did not show up to the lab for three months.
| | 7
|
| Condensed liquid oxygen or solid argon with liquid nitrogen. (A mistake you only make once.)
| | 6
|
| dated a person from the same lab
| | 6
|
| Dropped flask containing precious compound in the rotaevap water bath.
| | 6
|
| Trusted a fellow lab-mate's notebook without checking reference and watched as giant exotherm blew reaction everywhere.
| | 6
|
| Tried to cool beer bottle quickly in liquid nitrogen, causing the bottle to shatter and beer to spray all over the laboratory.
| | 4
|
| Used a platic basket to put small pieces of glassware in oven. Had to scratch out the molten plastic cake to clean the oven.
| | 3
|
| Did not add product to sample for NMR, or GCMS analysis.
| | 3
|
| Followed procedure as instructed by evil prof; should have seen the fountain of vile chromium-laced goo coming!
| | 2
|
| putting a reaction in someone's fumehood and forgot to remove and then after two to three days putting the same reaction again.
| | 2
|
| Forget to wear gloves while handling picrates...became sensitized
| | 2
|
| misuse the reagent,mislabel the reaction number
| | 2
|
| Decided to become a theoretician after checking off a few of these...to the relief of the department.
| | 2
|
| Turned the heat up on a reaction to get it to heat up more quickly, forgot to turn it back down, reaction went out the top of the condenser
| | 2
|
| Blamed terrible gas on Swern reaction, which no one was performing at the time
| | 1
|
| Spilled solvent into a drinking bottle on the benchtop then drank it
| | 1
|
| melted a round bottom flask while drying (under vacuum) celite for the glove box... twice.
| | 1
|
| Performed 10-step DFT linear transit on the wrong part of a 200-atom transition metal complex
| | 1
|
| heptane distillation.. forgot to close the stopper in the collecting flask
| | 1
|
| didn't use a Luer lock on syringe with positive pressure of Argon and...Zowie...reagent fountain.
| | 1
|
| Squirted low-boiling point solvent into flask straight from hot-water bath on rotovap. Solvent, along with compound, volatilized into room.
| | 1
|
| Put plastic basket in oven, basket melted.
| | 1
|
| Have sex in the lab.
| | 1
|
|
|
