An I-hate-this-place Day

All I want to know is whether I made the sulfide or not. Therefore I will need to make an XPS standard. All I need to do is to heat the reagent to 600C for one hour under Argon. Likity splikity, right? WRONG. This is Israel. Nothing it seems can be done here without making it painfully complicated.


So I go hunting for a tube furnace which are somewhat ubiquitous in chemistry departments. Material goes in a little porcelain boat, which you slide in a glass(quartz) tube, send inert gas flowing though the tube and heat the sucker (see pick from my friend Chico's lab). My old lab in Alberta had three of these set ups. After going on a wild goose chase and constantly being pointed to muffle furnaces and not tube furnaces, I found one in another group, but, fair enough, they won't let me use their tubes because my reaction has sulfur in it.

So I need to get 3 cm diameter quartz tube with two standard glass joints on the end. So after a few days, I finally get a hold of the glass blower, who only works part time and on his schedule. I show him the pick, he says he already has a quartz tube and everything sounds copacetic. A day later he shows up in my office and tells me he wants to put quartz joints on the end since you can't put quartz next to glass. So a week and calling four suppliers later, we discover we can't get quartz joints in Israel. So glass blower has to put a quartz-to-glass connector in between the 3 cm tube and the glass joints. All right, fine, go ahead.

Now the boss wants to buy a whole freaking furnace. I am the first person in the group who needed one (and only for one experiment), a lab upstairs will let me use theirs as long as I have my own tubes, but no, the boss wants a whole furnace for us. And he wants it stored in my fumehood so the other students, who have never asked for one before nor know what one is, can use it without moving it from the bench. It will take up at least half my hood.

This is now about a month later since I first wanted to make the standard.

I went to pick up my tube at the glass blowers this morning. The connectors he put on are about one cm in diameter so there is a narrow bottle neck between the 3 cm tube and the joint. Therefore, I won't be able to fit in the porcelain boat nor do my experiment.

Why is everything so complicated here? I am going to bruise my forehead from hitting it against the wall.