A MGS Reference?!?

wait i found the story actually [link 1] [link 2]

1. Googling "Canada gay sex pay toilets" just brings up a bunch of reblogs of this post

2. There does not seem to have been any sort of norm of public toilets in Canada charging money to use in the 20th century

Guy certainly knows about it

So I'm sitting in the staff work area and one of my colleagues comes up to me. There's an open day this weekend, and so we need to plan an activity for the would-be students.

"Simple!" I say. "Let's get them to dissect some owl pellets. Hands on, fun, they get to play with skulls."

"Good idea!" she says. "But we'll need something even fancier for the open day in February. What can we do? Perhaps we can take some soil samples."

And as we're debating the photogenic merits of soil Vs dead mice...

Suddenly, a Dashing and Handsome Stranger (read: an autistic engineering lecturer) appears with a flourish (read: launches himself into a seat beside us while visibly and physically vibrating with excitement about his special interest being Useful) and asks "HELLO I'M SORRY DID YOU SAY SOIL BECAUSE I HAVE A RAMAN MICROSCOPE"

"Amazing!" declares my colleague. "...Who are you?"

"COME AND SEE IT!!!" he says, currently the human embodiment of the :D emoticon.

We went and saw it. It's an excellent microscope and his ten minute infodump about it was both spectacular and also extremely useful. We're going to use it to assess microplastics.

And then we compared notes on working in labs, and he told me about the time he was sent to the 'chemical cupboard' in his last lab and found a Tesco bag of asbestos, three and a half kilos of TNT, and half a pint of cyanide, and when he told the health and safety woman she just said he should use a lone working protocol, and he was so angry he yelled A LONE WORKING PROTOCOL WILL NOT SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM A DIRTY BOMB, CAROLINE

"Great," he said. "Where is the chemical cupboard?"

"Shrug emoji," his boss said gravely, and wandered off to have crisps.

So he spent an hour wandering the building and trying his keys in every lock before finally finding a door that opened, and upon finally opening it, was immediately greeted by a Tesco carrier bag on the floor labelled 'Asbestos, do not touch'.

"Right-o," he thought. "No touching that."

But then he had two hours left to familiarise himself with the packed shelf contents of quite a large room, and the problem is that when you tell an autistic lab tech to familiarise themselves with a room full of chemicals, what they hear is not "Have a quick look so you have an idea of what's there", it's "These chemicals must be catalogued in detail and also here have a time pressure," so he was going to be both Thorough and Grumpy about this. And this room was packed.

The oldest bottle he found was a reagent opened in 1959.

It had crystallised.

("It was quite beautiful, actually," he told me dreamily. "A work of art. I wish I'd kept it.")

The cyanide, when he finally found it, was in a stoppered glass vial. So that was the point he lost his shit and went and grabbed Caroline.

The kicker is, Caroline didn't care. She insisted they didn't have the money or resources to spare on getting rid of it. So he had to march all the way to the Dean's office.

"You look like you're having a bad day," she said warily.

"Well I thought it would peak with the Tesco carrier bag of asbestos I found," he said, "but I was very wrong."

Yes we're friends now. Every time he sees me in the staff work room he will do a right-angled pivot over to me and sit down and we chat for at least half an hour

We may be about to work together because one of my students wants to pine marten scat analysis. I asked him if he thought it would be possible with one of his microscopes. That led to a three-quarter-hour increasingly excited discussion about possible methodologies (he was supposed to be in a meeting during it but refused to go). I sent him the student in the end so he could talk to her directly. He's very excited about it.

One of the munitions lecturers wanted to use the microscope to analyse explosive samples which led to IT'S POWERED BY A LASER, LLYWELYN, ARE YOU INSANE so now everyone has to do a training course on the microscopes. He made a place for me on the course though because I was nice about his microscopes before. :)

And one week ago today, his wife gave birth to their first child! He came in briefly today because an old friend of his is interviewing for a job with the uni (she is a second autistic lab tech and equally delightful, and they waylaid me on my way to lunch to chat), so he showed me a picture of his newborn daughter cuddling a fluffy stegosaurus. She is very cute and looks like him. When I said this latter part, he said "You realise that one is the baby, right? Not the stegosaurus?" so his dad jokes are already coming in.

LOL, no. I am not the bigger person. He has done some fiendishly evil shit. I hope he dies. Soon and painfully.

And no, I am not “becoming the thing I hate” nor am I “being just as bad as him” … are you fucking kidding me??

At a minimum, to be “as bad” as McConnell, I would have to spend the next 80yrs doing diabolically evil shit to needy people, so please miss me with that Pollyanna bullshit

So in conclusion,

Dangers of working on a set.