A unexpected thing happened today in the lab. There I was, processing some fossil clay at the sink, ipod blaring, bebopping and scatting away to 'Easy Lover' by Phil Collins. Just as I thought to myself how rad it was to finally be earning money without having to work in 'Lollywood' at the Airport West cinema anymore, I notice a slight sound of trickling liquid in my general vicinity.
I let this go on for a while because I thought it was just the sound of water running down the sink. After a couple of minutes, I turned around to get a pen, only to find that I was completely surrounded by a huge puddle of liquid that was slowly making its way around and into about 300 cardboard boxes of fossil bearing rock and mud under one of the lab tables.
Now, the one thing about random floodings in a laboratory is that you initially can't be sure if it that liquid is in fact water. Because the next sink down was sometimes used for acid disposal, there was a lingering 1% chance that I could have been standing in something of a slightly lower pH with a slightly higher incidence of skin melting than water. My fears were put at ease however when I lifted my shoe off the ground and my leg didn't snap of at the kneecap, Terminator 2 style.
Yep - I was pretty sure it was water, and pretty sure it was the sediment trap that hath doth overfloweth betwix mine hooves.
Unfortunately, I had to deliver the good news to my supervisor. The best part was that I got to bust in on a meeting he was having with the head of the department in order to tell him I had just flooded his lab. Luckily, he's a righteous dude, and I didn't get into any trouble.
What I did get into was about an hour of mopping up the mess, with millions of years of Victorian prehistoric plant history being mopped into my slop bucket like so much fetid bilge water. The highlight of the afternoon was when two absolutely delightful blokes from Building and Services came to fix the sediment trap. These guys were more interested in my fossils and fossil related chitchat than the laboratories ensuing high tide. Isn’t it funny how most of the people who work on campus in non-academic roles are usually the nicest people?
Yeah… everyone except for those cunts in the scholarships office, who can $uck my b@lls.
Anyway, the mess is cleaned up and tomorrow is another day of fossil processing and adult contemporary hits…and
nothing passes the time faster than my Steve Winwood/Bruce Hornsby megamix.
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