Another Week ...

This Chem 102 business is tough. This week, I had my ass handed to me daily. Lab stinks. Class stinks. The whole rotten thing stinks. Our new pup is really cutting into my ability to study at home. So, I'm looking for a new study sanctuary so that I can actually get some work done. It's no fun being behind in class. During one lecture, I might as well have been listening to Charlie Brown's teacher for two hours. "Wahh waa, waa whaaa wah wah whaaaaa." No friggin' clue what she was talking about. It's gonna take an entire skyscraper of puppies to get me out of this one.

9 Solutions Puzzle!
So, our final lab this week was to solve for 9 unknown substances. We get to lab and are presented with 9 test tubes, each with a small sample of an unknown solution. Prior to arriving, however, we were told what the nine solutions would be and had to devise a plan to determine what each one was in lab. So, we created a flowchart to determine how to test and identify them one by one. For example, the one with a stongly basic pH could only be a certain substance. We knew, then, that it would react in a specific way with only one or two other substances and so on and so forth. The goal, according to the lab instructors, was to be in and out of there in about 20 minutes. It's why we did all of the stinking pre-work before showing up.

So, we get there and start running our tests. We got about 1/4 of the way into it and our results were showing an impossibility. We kept testing and testing (as did everyone in the room) with no success. I told my team that the lab assistant either screwed up the solutions that she gave us or made some other mistake. An hour and a half later, it came to light that the lab assistant had, in fact, screwed up the solutions and made some other mistakes.

She actually said, "It's like this every year." What the hell does that mean? Obviously, she has never held a real job. I would've gotten canned in a minute if I tried to rationalize tremendous failure with some crap-tastic quote like that one. Then, she actually left early. Outstanding.