Work Atmosphere
We use thermos flasks a great deal at work - we could spend £250 on a single, fragile glass vacuum dewar or we could buy ten moderately priced camping thermos flasks - the extra efficiency in liquid nitrogen is not worth the outlay. But I digress. The latest batch are platic-coated metal, and the top/cap/mug bits are also in use in the lab.
I left one of the mugs at the back of my hood last week, where I'd been using it to hold a dry-ice/acetone both to cool a reaction. Yesterday, I noticed that it had changed colour and gone ... reddish. It turns out that the atmosphere in my hood is sufficiently caustic that it had not only eaten away all the coating, but was merrily chewing away at the steel as well, rusting it to hell.
I'm torn between (a) I work with really cool shit! and (b) I breathe this every day.
I left one of the mugs at the back of my hood last week, where I'd been using it to hold a dry-ice/acetone both to cool a reaction. Yesterday, I noticed that it had changed colour and gone ... reddish. It turns out that the atmosphere in my hood is sufficiently caustic that it had not only eaten away all the coating, but was merrily chewing away at the steel as well, rusting it to hell.
I'm torn between (a) I work with really cool shit! and (b) I breathe this every day.