Chemical Memories

By the grace of all that is good about science: Science Badges.

I claim a few of these badges, but I wish I could claim the shower badge. Those showers in chem lab always freaked me out. I remember watching the lab safety video in high school and noticing two things:

1. Male student A spills mystery chemical on himself and immediately runs to the shower and starts stripping. Male student B idly stands by and watches with no expression on his face. If he expressed fear or concern, it would be less disturbing, but his lack of expression was, to me, his suppressed joy of a deadly strip tease. After viewing that, my love of chemistry was dwarfed by my fear of spilling mystery chemical on myself and having some creepy guy stare at me excitedly as the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music starts to play.



2. Rubber gloved hands break a glass rod and shove the glass through the palm of the other (obviously fake, yet still bleeding) hand and keeps shoving way past the point where one would react to the pain. It was almost like the person just gave up on life after the accident and just decided to commit suicide via hand stabbing.



Are all safety videos made to be funny? Maybe it's a method to make them more memorable. This German forklift safety video is pretty well known classic.