Glory Days

Progress is not always beneficial.

Back in my school days, in chemistry classes we used to pipette various liquids by mouth, and think nothing of it. Mouth-pipetting is great; if you’re reasonably competent you just grab a pipette, suck, hold pressure with tip of tongue, blow when necessary. No extra equipment required. Of course, this must have been bad for us because school children in their thousands were dying from pipette-transmitted diseases and from ingesting benzine or whatever we happened to be playing with that week.

Yeah.

So, I went to university and found that the Health & Safety officers had decreed that mouth-pipetting was far too dangerous (read, “people might sue us”), as witnessed by the carnage in our classrooms, and that we must use these beasties in our practical classes:
!http://www.kasablanka.com/images/products/PIPETTE-CONTROLLER_B.jpg”!.

These were great: The glass pipettes, when put into the appropriate hole, would easily break, thus enabling cack-handed students to shove jagged glass spears through the palms of their hands (which, unlike the pipette-transmitted diseases and drinking of benzine I actually observed, first-hand as it were. Twice). Glass pipettes, of course, are far more environmentally-friendly (and cheaper) than the disposable plastic ones that do not break quite so readily, and universities spend too much on Administration (including Health and Safety. . .) to be able to afford a good supply of these fellas:
!http://www.tissue-cell-culture.com/images/products/related/PipetBoy.gif”!.

I’m saying this because I spent fifteen minutes this morning wandering around the lab looking for one of those bloody things so that I could use a single rainforest-killing ozone-depleting global-warming non-student skewering plastic pipette. Eventually I found one of these
and was gratified that, after mumble years I still remembered how to use one, onehanded. Yay. Go me.

In the old days, I’d have just sucked up the 2xTY and spat it out. Progress, you see?

Oh, and while doing the Google thing to find some pictures with which to illustrate this rambling nonsense, I came across a girl band who call themselves _”the”:http://thetorturegarden.blogspot.com/2006/06/he-likes-boy-in-uniform.html Pipettes _. This tickles me.

(Image credit )

I’m convinced that all this H&S nonsense is a plot by the Administration to destroy the practise of science in our generation and thus secure more funding for themselves, like some aggressive and implacable canker feeding off the lifeblood of all that is good and true and wholesome. See my next novel for details.