With more than 1000 projects and the accumulated experience and expertise of numerous man years, we still do mistakes and have accidents.
- We broke a smoothie mixer when we blended a circuit board.*
- We have turned the calorimeter tubing blue.
- We have corroded the surface of the ATR-IR instrument.**
- We have made some kind of nasty brown gas and we have gotten peat fibers everywhere.
We do make risk assessments and we ask a lot of questions but:
a) doing experiments mean you are literally experimenting
b) we can also be wrong
Not knowing is risky, which is also why we have a role to play. Not knowing is the basis for what we do and why we need to do it. By knowing better, we can all take better decisions. But the road to knowing better can of course be a bit risky. So we need to work with people who dare to take risks, who dare to share the story, also when the decisions made were the wrong ones. Here comes more that you are welcome to talk to us about and learn from.
We have come into the lab in the morning to find the floor wet by our sample that had completely corroded the bottom of the container we kept it in. (Cake p.34). We have produced chlorine gas in the facilities of a client. We have made someone else’s lab reek of burned fat and pool chlorine and our own stink from rotten chicken…
Sharing is Caring, make a cake and talk about your mishaps.
* confidentiality hinders us from telling you why, but it is true.
** The instrument producer acknowledged our risk assessment, we all learned and became good friends
