Hothead Emily

So yesterday, about 15 minutes before the end of the day, I had to inject a small dye into my radioactive samples. I had nine samples to work with and things went pretty smoothly for the first six samples. When I got to number seven, as I was pipetting the dye into the sample, I noticed with annoyance that the dye was somehow stuck in the pipette tip. At this point, the smart thing to do was to dispose the pipette tip anyway into the waste container, because the tip has already touched the sample and was considered "hot." Did Emily choose the smart and logical course of action? Nope. Her basal neurological functions took over and by sheer brute force, she thought she could shake the dye down the tip of the pipette. Instead, what happened was the pipette tip popped off and the dye went kersplat!!! everywhere. Suddenly, the area I was working at suffered a first degree contamination and became the hot zone.

Very meekly and very apologetically, I told my mentor my snafoo. He told me to not move and proceeded to methodically check every surface with the geiger counter detector. For those unfamiliar, it's like any other detectors, but it is supposed to sniff out radioactivity. When it detects a high level of radioactivity, it gives off repeated high pitched shrieks, literally the detector is screaming at you "contamination!" in loud jarring tones.

So we ran the detectors over the surfaces and the detector went berserk. So we had to clean everything in the area. Then, my mentor said, check yourself. I ran the detector over myself and my lab coat was hot. So the mentor told me to ease off the coat and he promptly threw it away. Then I continued to run the detector over myself and it was okay until it reached my HEAD. Then the detector went nuts over me again. Disbelieving, I moved the detector away from my head - nothing, intermittent beeps at best. Move it back to my head: shrieks somewhat similar to those of Harry Potter's Mandrakes. Bad, bad news indeed.

My mentor was suddenly on the phone, calling all relevant people. The radiation safety people, the lab chief etc. My boss, the lab chief, came back to the lab as soon as she found out, armed with Suave shampoo and a truly good sense of humor. The next 30 minutes was spent wiping my head down with wet towels (which actually did take alot of the radioactivity off) and then dumped a quart of Suave on my head. I couldn't help giggling during the truly bizarre situation I found myself in. What a great Suave commercial that would have made. Then I went home and took a shower, washing my head copiously with water and soap. Told my family and promptly freaked everyone out. Told Jason, got yelled at for half an hour for being careless. Then called it a night.