Back in grad school, I ended up being the senior grad student. (This was largely because my professor was an incompetent idiot and all the other senior grad students had quit.) I was basically the lab manager in addition to handling my own research.
Eventually, the professor hired a new grad student. [Student] was one of those people whose default expression was slackjawed, gormless imbecility. When you talked to him or gave advice or instruction, he’d just stare at you with this vacant expression and then just turn away, never acknowledging a thing you’d said.
[Student] was a rolling disaster from pretty much day one. He constantly destroyed equipment. For example, he destroyed several hundred dollars worth of non-magnetic steel tweezers for TEM (Transmission Electron Microscopy) sample work by taking them all out of their custom carrying cases and just tossing them point-down into a glass beaker, destroying their tips. When he was called out on doing this, he just shrugged and wordlessly stared at me.
[Student] would also bring in his crappy evangelical Christian rock music and play it on the lab stereo until the other students and I just got rid of the stereo to not have to listen to the crap. It was crappy not just because it was evangelical Christian music. That’s not my thing at all, but I’ll grant that some of those bands can at least play well. This crap was just awful.
The final straw was one morning when I opened the lab up, walked in, and nearly ran right into an unsecured gas cylinder sitting in the middle of the lab aisleway.
For the uninitiated, gas cylinders must be secured when the heavy metal transport cap has been removed. The gas outlet at the top is fairly delicate, and if the cylinder falls over and that valve hits something, it will probably get torn off. This turns a heavy metal gas cylinder into an uncontrolled rocket capable of punching through six-inch concrete walls and turning people into red smears. It’s serious s***. You do not remove the heavy metal transport cap until the cylinder is firmly attached to a sturdy wall clamp or other safety device.
This gas cylinder was just sitting in the middle of a walkway with a gas regulator on it and a clear plastic tube trailing over to a bench — the perfect setup for a cylinder getting knocked over and causing a disaster. To add insult to this, the f****** thing was literally a foot away from a cylinder tiedown I had mounted to one of the lab benches.
After my heart started again, I carefully walked up to the cylinder, grabbed it in a bear hug, slowly walked it over to the clamp, and secured it. Once I’d made the cylinder safe, I examined it to try and figure out what was going on. That’s when I saw what gas was in it.
Hydrogen. The unsecured gas cylinder was full of hydrogen.
If it had fallen over and hit the regulator on any of the benches all around it, it would have turned into a rocket that would have started punching holes through walls, shooting through a busy building with over fifty scientists working in it, and leaving behind a trail of hundreds of cubic feet of explosive hydrogen gas. Any flame or spark would have then detonated the hydrogen gas like a fuel-air explosive bomb. This thing could easily have killed most of the people in the building.
At this point, I was on the warpath. I was seeing red. I stormed over to the neighboring building where some of the other grad students were and demanded to know who had done such a mind-bogglingly stupid thing. They were all pretty appalled and told me it wasn’t them. But one mentioned that good ol’ [Student] had been talking about needing hydrogen gas for some nanoparticle reduction experiments.
Keep in mind that this sort of experiment needs maybe a few cubic feet of hydrogen gas — a tiny fraction of the volume of the full-sized bomb cylinder that had been in the lab. He could have just ordered a tiny benchtop-sized lecture bottle that was far safer and had more than enough gas.
At that point, I wanted blood. I spent the next hour or so scouring the three buildings of my department, looking for [Student], ready to beat the living s*** out of him the minute I laid eyes on him. I’m pretty sure the other grad students warned him to make himself scarce.
After I couldn’t find him, I went to the professor and basically told him that it was either me or [Student]. [Student] “left” a week or so later, and I never saw him again.
