In plenty of time for April Fools Day, may I present a thread on good practical jokes to play in labs?
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Dry ice exploding out of snap-cap tubes is old hat. The snatching away of our secondary school chemistry teacher’s chalk with invisible cotton threads as she reached for it was fun, but generic and juvenile. I want to hear about the most creative and elaborate (OK, and safe) tricks you’ve ever seen played in a lab environment.
The best one I’ve ever seen was in my PhD lab. We had a new student, and the senior technician was showing him how to do a Western blot. This technician was extremely proficient and respected, but was one of those people who insisted that everyone in the lab had to follow her protocols exactly. Deviation was sure to result in the failing of your degree, rejection of your grant applications and retraction of your papers.
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In this particular case, the technician was repeatedly telling the student that he had to be sure to follow her recipe precisely. Add all the right ingredients, in the right amounts and order, or the gel WILL NOT SET. And then you’ll fail your PhD and have to leave Glasgow in shame. So add ALL THE INGREDIENTS. In the EXACT AMOUNTS I’VE WRITTEN DOWN. Or the gel WILL NOT SET.
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You get the picture.
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After she’d poured the gel and taken the student off to learn how to do tissue culture PROPERLY, the other technician in the lab hid her gel rig in his cupboard and replaced it with an identical rig filled with water.
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The technician and student returned an hour later, the student looking haggard. She informed him that when you’ve set up a gel according to her EXACT RECIPE, with ALL THE RIGHT INGREDIENTS, it will set properly and you’ll be able to tip it upside down…
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Water all over the floor.
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To her everlasting credit, after her initial stunned silence while the rest of us howled with laughter and gasped for air, we showed her the real gel rig, which had set perfectly in the cupboard, and she laughed along with the rest of us.
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OK, your turn!
Submitted to April’s scientiae-carnival” rel=”tag”
When I was in industry a common trick was to use clear tape to tape the phone button down so it sounded as if the phone was dead. Or the ‘glue fairies’ who went around at night and glued the contents of your desk to your desk. My favorite is to find someone who types with two fingers and looks at the keys all the time and switch two keys on their keyboard. The other option is to go into Word autocorrect and set it so that when they type ‘I’ or their name, it autocorrects it to ‘God’ or similar.
If you put the dry ice in a lenght of rubber tubing and knot both ends, it goes with a larger bang.
I do remember playing a lot of jokes on people having showers when I stayed in halls of residence. We just had cubicles where you could fling stuff over the top. The best one was for someone’s birthday. We knew she always shampoo’d twice so as she was near the end of her bottle we poured out the contents and filled it with golden syrup to a similar volume, then we carefully topped it off with enough shampoo for one wash. We listeded for her doing the first shampoo, then just as she’d rinsed off we tossed a bag of flour over the cubical door. The second wash of the hair – flour and golden syrup! We had a fresh bottle of her shampoo handy, and also some nice new shower gel…If you think I was cruel, I wasn’t – this was to the person who arranged for me to be flung into a bath of lemon jelly for my 18th birthday. There were many more jokes that year. It was fun.
“Go into Word autocorrect and set it so that when they type ‘I’ or their name, it autocorrects it to ‘God’ or similar.”
That is brilliant.
At school – make a lot of nitrogen triiodide crystals and scatter them thinly across the junior school playground. Lovely.
One day the sysadmins at the institute where I did my PhD change the network so that when one typed dir, one was told that the folder was empty. Not everyone was amused.
Katy’s wins with the golden syrup for meanest trick! I do like the nitrogen triiodide one too. And misuse of computer equipment opens up a huge new field of trickery. A woman I knew in Glasgow (that institute was full of tricksters) once stepped away from her computer for a few minutes and had the words “I have recently become a lesbian” inserted as point number 4 in a 10-point list she was emailing to a collaborator. She didn’t even realise until he replied in pointwise fashion, with the reply to number 4 reading “none of my business” and then carrying on as if nothing had happened.
I was at least one of the victims of some phone hackery when I was on sabbatical at a well-known university in the US. The professor stormed into my office and in irate tones asked whom I knew on Pitcairn Island, and why I had been phoning them (at vast expense) from my office phone.
I agree with Cath that the golden syrup is particularly mean but fun.
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Partially related, brother and I in our yoof used to discreetly squirt sticky lemon juice onto our next door neighbors windows shortly before they came out to clean them. Makes them a right b*gger to clean…
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Similar to the “I have recently become a lesbian” sketch, sending suggestive emails to staff members from folks computers when they are away from desk was another favourite.
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Finally from BBC Scotland’s Chewin’ the Fat, this Air Traffic Controller Fun sketch remains a fav.
Henry – I too was a nitrogen triiodide fan (for those not of an explosive mentality it is a black substance that explodes on touch). I have to confess to once applying it very thinly to the black keys of the college organ, which caused the organ scholar (and more particularly the choir) some entertainment.
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I did take part in some great practical jokes at college. We had a self-lighting firework display one evening, with fireworks all around the court, set up by teams with different length time fuses, and then watched as the porter ran from place to place with a torch (this was about 1 in the morning) trying to find who was lighting them.
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But most wonderful was a totally fake ancient ceremony called The Immersion of the High Professor. This involved a procession down King’s Parade in Cambridge and through to the Backs where the person playing the High Professor was slapped across the face with a fish before being stripped and rowed away while a choir (which I was part of) sang Super Flumina Babyloniis. It was magnificently large scale. I particularly liked the Latin responsary the choir had to chant while the professor was being disrobed (it was supposed to re-enact an occasion many years before when a professor had set an example to his students by bathing in the Cam). One couplet went:
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In combinationibus stat / Sancta Michaelis designatus est
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… which could with a certain amount of imagination be translated as ‘he stands in his combinations / labelled St Michael’s’.
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For years after I had people tell me about this amazing ancient ceremony they’d witnessed.
Brian – I’d laugh, but I won’t, in case I lose control and rupture something.
Ah, silliness on a grand scale. How very British. I do miss the place sometimes!
Graham, I just managed to access the Chewin’ the Fat clip (no videos at work!). Good stuff. Is it still on?
Will pm ya Cath since this is digressing from this post.
Academic labs always seem to be a hot bed of pranksters.
Prank 1: Legendary prank I only heard about:
The grad students in the lab decided to play a prank on a student who made many, many agarose gels, and was notorious for hogging the agarose gel equipment to analyze her PCR reactions. They took some agarose, melted it, dropped in some yellow food colouring, and then stuck a O’Henry bar and let is solidify in the drawer. They didn’t just let it solidfy in a gel tray, they let it solidify in the DRAWER which made it all a goopy mess that looks like “you know what”. Also stole all her gel combs so when she actually went to pour a gel,after the mess was clean, there wasn’t a gel comb in sight with which to make wells.
Prank 2: We did this to the new lab of the new head of the department:
Our PI was the old head of the department, and still had fair pull in the department. He managed to get ahold of official university letterhead, and got the safety officer to sign a letter saying their new lab (the lab space they inherited the month before) was shut down for an indeterminate time due to X (cant’ remember what it was, but it was major). We actually had the techs next door read the notice and come running over in tears, thinking they wouldn’t be able to go back for weeks. They never lived that one down.
Prank #3
We had these lab chairs with gas lifts (we were spoiled). I am a tall person, so liked to keep mine high up. One morning I went to sit on the chair, and it very slowly started to descend. Over about 10 mins, it descended. I didn’t notice until my nose was nigh on level with the lab bench! I got up, and figured something was up but sat down again…again I was near the floor. It wasn’t until I turned the chair over that I realized my lab nemesis had tied the gas lift to the side of the chair so that it would always descend. I got him back though….
#1 is evil! #3 is totally the kind of thing that went on all the time in Glasgow. How did you get him back?
that’s weird… no idea how I did that.
that is just sooo funny!
I can’t really remember exactly how I got him back. I think I put Smarties in his cooling bacterial agar plates, or something like that. He had a penchant for leaving the lids off to cool them in the flow hood, and no one could use it in the meantime. Of course, he’d forget they were there until the end of the day, which meant that if you wanted to use it, you had to move his stuff. So I tossed some Smarties in to harden along with the agar plate. Just to one of them of course….
And here’s me thinking that Smarties can only be used for good!