Grave Robbing

This morning, The Chicken took me to the secret inorganic chemistry graveyard: the room where ancient chemicals go to die or gather dust. Like the somewhat-ordered, somewhat-jumbled organization of a real cemetery, families of chemicals can be found resting in peace together under a layer of ubiquitous brown Jerusalem dust. With cardboard box and latex gloves, we went grave robbing. I pilfered greedily like a kid in a candy store up and down the rows of metal salts and reagents as well as some handy organicy stuff (I left most of that to The Chicken). There seemed to be an endless supply of chemistry treasure. If you want a five kilo bottle of potassium dichromate or a lifetime supply of Vitamin C, this is the place. Not to mention some pharmaceutically controlled substances which I won’t mention by name. I was looking for one of my metal reagents that costs about 150 bucks a gram, and I found seven bottles of it. SEVEN.

The only thing the place was missing was a dude with a paper lizard on his shoulder.

I came back downstairs and was waxing poetic to my labmates about the awesomeness of the place and I got accused of being a geek. I am sorry, but after nine years of post secondary education I am allowed unabashedly to be a geek. And really, who are we kidding here? Was there any point in my life where I wasn’t a geek?

I am a geek and proud of it.