Jace Riven

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."