This is also a re-post that I am dedicating to my newest 43T playmate, Kitty. I hope she enjoys her bedtime story. :)

As I’ve mentioned before, in addition to being an English major in college, I was also Pre-Med specializing in chemistry. I have a whole host of great stories from chemistry lab that I could share, but for this entry, I’m going with one of my two “finest hours.” One of the perks of being an English major and a Chemsistry minor was I always had stuff to read during those long steps in lab when you had to cook stuff for an hour or two or just wait around for some other reason. Well, one week, I saw that one step in our lab involved a 3 hour wait, so along with all of my chemsitry books, I also brought my Collected Works of Shakespeare (Riverside edition of course) with me to chem lab. Our assigned play for that week was King Lear, which is my second favorite Shakespeare play and my favorite of the tragedies. (My favorite Shakespeare play is The Merchant of Venice.) As I started cooking my reagents, I excitedly began reading all about Cordelia, Edmund, and of course, the fool.

Unfortunately, I was so into reading the play that I accidentally skipped a step, and I did not realize what was happening in my beaker, as a result. The end result was I made Mustard Gas, which for those of you who don’t know, is not only poisonous but was used by the Germans during World War I. That’s right: I made a chemical weapon. I discovered my faux pas when my Professor asked me how much of a certain reagent I had used and I suddenly realized that the answer was none. He then yelled at me and told me what I had done. I was taken by surprise. I mean a minute before I was lost in the storm with Lear, now I was an aspiring weapons manufacturer, and all I could say in response was “I didn’t mean to.”

We had to evacuate the entire building and call in the hazardous materials squad all because of me and my stupidity. I guess I should add that this was the second time that semester that they had to be called in and the building evacuated because of something I had done. One of the rescue workers even recognized me. Also, due to my enraptured reading state, I had also breathed in a fairly considerable amount. Not enough to be life threatening, but I did burn all of my taste buds off. It’s Ok. I recovered just fine in about three weeks or so. All I could think about after I realized that everyone was OK and I wasn’t going to get kicked out of Advanced Organic Chemistry was “Damn, I left my book in there. I hope I get to finish reading the play tonight.”