(no subject)
Well, it’s been quite a while since I wrote last. Since August I’ve been working again at the university. Full time. I’m responsible for the chemical supply and glassware purchases, chemical waste disposal, the making of different solutions required in teaching plus I teach different lab courses once a week. It helps me keep up to date with the necessary chemicals. Not very exciting generally, but a job, somewhere to start off.
The most exciting days so far was my birthday and the day after, 9-10.10. I attended a course held by a chief of the Käpylä fire department. We went through a lot of theoretical stuff, like the requirements for fire extinguishers, some general emergency situations, watched quite a few videos, had an exam in the end (and got this official card for all of Scandinavia). We also spent several hours putting out fires. First we used blankets. The chief set a barrel with petrol on fire. The flames rose up to about 1.5 meters, he said it was about as bad as when a TV has caught fire and burned in 3 minutes. We had to walk up with our hands wrapped in the blanket, holding the blanket in front of us above our heads (to protect our faces, but then you couldn’t see where you were going) and then place it over the barrel with the burning petrol to put it out. Quite exciting. We also used powder extinguishers (outside, they make a real mess) we tested the fire hose (quite a lot of pressure there) and put out a fire in a fume cupboard with a CO2-extinguisher. We also talked about the emergency showers and eye-washes. He recommended testing the emergency showers once a month.
So, on Friday afternoon I felt it was my responsibility to test our emergency showers. We have one shower in the hallway upstairs, a joint shower for the three labs in that hallway. On the other side of the hallway there’s office rooms, amongst them mine. Anyway, I climbed on a high lab stool with a bucket and covered the shower head (which sticks out directly from the ceiling and is roughly 20 cm in diameter) and asked a co-worker to pull the shower handle. The emergency shower had no floor drain, so the idea was just to pull the handle down and push it right back up, collecting the water in the bucket. What we hadn’t anticipated was the FORCE with which the water came out of that shower. Afterwards we found out the shower was linked to the main water supply so the pressure was the same as from the fire hose I’d used outside the day before….Anyway, so the water certainly didn’t stay in the bucket, but hit the bottom, splashed up and ended up in my lap. And (probably due to the pressure) my co-worker couldn’t push up the handle to turn off the shower and the water started splashing on the floor. I’d say about a liter a second. Being half soaked already I went to stand directly under the shower and tried to push the handle up. The metal handle just bent and wouldn’t close (great construction). Within seconds I was soaked through. By this time our commotion started gathering quite a crowd. I sprinted off to the departments main entrance 300 m away to get help from the porter (must have been a sight), he’d know who to call. He called the building’s plumbers and we headed back, arriving a couple of seconds before the plumbers. By this time the whole Swedish-speaking group was involved in trying to sweep the water into the floor drains of the two labs closest to the shower. Still, at least half the water ended up “waterfalling” to the floor below. This requires some explanation: the hallway with the shower begins about 10 meters from the shower, before that there’s about 5 meters of railing where you look to the floor below, then there’s the stairs to go down. So a whole lot of the water fell down as a waterfall at this point. Quite impressive actually.
Anyway, the plumbers started opening up the ceiling, trying to look for an emergency valve. There was none. Finally one of the plumbers stood on a ladder and pushed the top of the metal pole (about a meter above the handle) up (when I pushed from the bottom the metal pole bent). After 20 minutes the shower was turned off. ( I thought it was 10 but was told by the secretary, who had looked at her watch when she started hearing the racket upstairs and when the shower was finally turned off that it was 20) Amounts to about 1200 liters of water. Afterwards we found out that in the cellar, which houses two new NMR-machines, water had come out of the electrical outlets. We had some angry people come visit us later. Luckily, and almost miraculously, no harm was done to any electrical appliances. Then it was time for a whole lot of mopping. The whole experience was such an adrenaline rush I could mop for almost an hour before starting to feel cold in the clothes soaked in cold water. Good thing I had my riding clothes to change into (I mostly have those with me since I go to the stable directly from work).
Then it was time for birthday celebrations in the coffee room. It so happens that we have three birthdays in a row: mine on the 9th, a researcher who sits in the office next to mine on the 10th and the head of the Swedish department on the 11th. A birthday speech was begun with “I hope you all enjoyed the opening ceremonies….” (with reference to the waterfall.) The plumbers and 2 porters stayed for cake as well. All in all it ended up being a bonding experience. It also highlighted the need for emergency closing valves, strong metal poles, floor drains, testing of the other showers. The shower I tested had never been tested and the building was built in ’95. No one blamed me, but I did become a bit of a celebrity.
Another quite exciting and sad story is that of the bat in the living room of our summerhouse the weekend before. I went to the summerhouse to keep my mom company. She’d complained about being alone. I thought I better go spend a weekend with her before it gets too cold. My mom doesn’t heat up the house too much. Partly to save electricity (my grandma pays the bills, the inheritance from my grandfather hasn’t been split up yet) and partly because she likes the cold, and I freeze really easily. On Saturday evening something starts flying around the living room. I call to my mom who was in the kitchen at this time that a bird has flown into the room. She comes over and says it’s a bat (it was flying so fast I couldn’t see what it was) . So we switched off the lights, opened the front door, turned on the lights outside and waited for maybe 5 minutes (and it was cold, as usual). When we switched on the lights the bat was gone.
The following morning I sat in the living room eating my breakfast when I looked up. The bat was hanging from the ceiling just above my head. I called to my mom (in the kitchen again) “the bat’s still here!” Mice, I’m used to, they only run around in two dimensions, but this bat, though its body was the size of a big mouse, gave me the creeps. The wings are creepy and make it quite big (even though it was peacefully sleeping now) and the fact that it can fly and be at head-level….. Neither of us knew what to do. I told my mom I needed to go to the bathroom (or well, the outdoor toilet) to postpone having to do anything. When I came back my mom was standing pushing the bat against the ceiling with a broom. The bat was squealing, my mom was shaking, obviously in a panic. Then she stopped pushing up the broom and the bat fell to the ground. It was quiet but opened and closed its wings in an attempt to fly. “Kill it!” my mom yells. At this point it was the only option, the bat was hurt, and I felt sorry for it. I still found it repulsive and scary (what if it all of a sudden could fly and flew in my face?) but managed to whack it with the broom once (it was one of those T-shaped brooms so I whacked it with the wooden end). It squealed again. It was horrible. “I can’t do this!” I yelled. My mom took a whack and it was dead. I was left with the job of getting rid of the corpse (in a way that the dogs couldn’t get at it). There on the shovel I looked at it more closely. A little grey furry thing with leathery wings, now neatly folded alongside its body. Its strange how we were both in such utter panic, me even more so than my mom. Bats should be conserved. Finland has signed a European conservation agreement I read later, but we killed this one, out of fear.
The most exciting days so far was my birthday and the day after, 9-10.10. I attended a course held by a chief of the Käpylä fire department. We went through a lot of theoretical stuff, like the requirements for fire extinguishers, some general emergency situations, watched quite a few videos, had an exam in the end (and got this official card for all of Scandinavia). We also spent several hours putting out fires. First we used blankets. The chief set a barrel with petrol on fire. The flames rose up to about 1.5 meters, he said it was about as bad as when a TV has caught fire and burned in 3 minutes. We had to walk up with our hands wrapped in the blanket, holding the blanket in front of us above our heads (to protect our faces, but then you couldn’t see where you were going) and then place it over the barrel with the burning petrol to put it out. Quite exciting. We also used powder extinguishers (outside, they make a real mess) we tested the fire hose (quite a lot of pressure there) and put out a fire in a fume cupboard with a CO2-extinguisher. We also talked about the emergency showers and eye-washes. He recommended testing the emergency showers once a month.
So, on Friday afternoon I felt it was my responsibility to test our emergency showers. We have one shower in the hallway upstairs, a joint shower for the three labs in that hallway. On the other side of the hallway there’s office rooms, amongst them mine. Anyway, I climbed on a high lab stool with a bucket and covered the shower head (which sticks out directly from the ceiling and is roughly 20 cm in diameter) and asked a co-worker to pull the shower handle. The emergency shower had no floor drain, so the idea was just to pull the handle down and push it right back up, collecting the water in the bucket. What we hadn’t anticipated was the FORCE with which the water came out of that shower. Afterwards we found out the shower was linked to the main water supply so the pressure was the same as from the fire hose I’d used outside the day before….Anyway, so the water certainly didn’t stay in the bucket, but hit the bottom, splashed up and ended up in my lap. And (probably due to the pressure) my co-worker couldn’t push up the handle to turn off the shower and the water started splashing on the floor. I’d say about a liter a second. Being half soaked already I went to stand directly under the shower and tried to push the handle up. The metal handle just bent and wouldn’t close (great construction). Within seconds I was soaked through. By this time our commotion started gathering quite a crowd. I sprinted off to the departments main entrance 300 m away to get help from the porter (must have been a sight), he’d know who to call. He called the building’s plumbers and we headed back, arriving a couple of seconds before the plumbers. By this time the whole Swedish-speaking group was involved in trying to sweep the water into the floor drains of the two labs closest to the shower. Still, at least half the water ended up “waterfalling” to the floor below. This requires some explanation: the hallway with the shower begins about 10 meters from the shower, before that there’s about 5 meters of railing where you look to the floor below, then there’s the stairs to go down. So a whole lot of the water fell down as a waterfall at this point. Quite impressive actually.
Anyway, the plumbers started opening up the ceiling, trying to look for an emergency valve. There was none. Finally one of the plumbers stood on a ladder and pushed the top of the metal pole (about a meter above the handle) up (when I pushed from the bottom the metal pole bent). After 20 minutes the shower was turned off. ( I thought it was 10 but was told by the secretary, who had looked at her watch when she started hearing the racket upstairs and when the shower was finally turned off that it was 20) Amounts to about 1200 liters of water. Afterwards we found out that in the cellar, which houses two new NMR-machines, water had come out of the electrical outlets. We had some angry people come visit us later. Luckily, and almost miraculously, no harm was done to any electrical appliances. Then it was time for a whole lot of mopping. The whole experience was such an adrenaline rush I could mop for almost an hour before starting to feel cold in the clothes soaked in cold water. Good thing I had my riding clothes to change into (I mostly have those with me since I go to the stable directly from work).
Then it was time for birthday celebrations in the coffee room. It so happens that we have three birthdays in a row: mine on the 9th, a researcher who sits in the office next to mine on the 10th and the head of the Swedish department on the 11th. A birthday speech was begun with “I hope you all enjoyed the opening ceremonies….” (with reference to the waterfall.) The plumbers and 2 porters stayed for cake as well. All in all it ended up being a bonding experience. It also highlighted the need for emergency closing valves, strong metal poles, floor drains, testing of the other showers. The shower I tested had never been tested and the building was built in ’95. No one blamed me, but I did become a bit of a celebrity.
Another quite exciting and sad story is that of the bat in the living room of our summerhouse the weekend before. I went to the summerhouse to keep my mom company. She’d complained about being alone. I thought I better go spend a weekend with her before it gets too cold. My mom doesn’t heat up the house too much. Partly to save electricity (my grandma pays the bills, the inheritance from my grandfather hasn’t been split up yet) and partly because she likes the cold, and I freeze really easily. On Saturday evening something starts flying around the living room. I call to my mom who was in the kitchen at this time that a bird has flown into the room. She comes over and says it’s a bat (it was flying so fast I couldn’t see what it was) . So we switched off the lights, opened the front door, turned on the lights outside and waited for maybe 5 minutes (and it was cold, as usual). When we switched on the lights the bat was gone.
The following morning I sat in the living room eating my breakfast when I looked up. The bat was hanging from the ceiling just above my head. I called to my mom (in the kitchen again) “the bat’s still here!” Mice, I’m used to, they only run around in two dimensions, but this bat, though its body was the size of a big mouse, gave me the creeps. The wings are creepy and make it quite big (even though it was peacefully sleeping now) and the fact that it can fly and be at head-level….. Neither of us knew what to do. I told my mom I needed to go to the bathroom (or well, the outdoor toilet) to postpone having to do anything. When I came back my mom was standing pushing the bat against the ceiling with a broom. The bat was squealing, my mom was shaking, obviously in a panic. Then she stopped pushing up the broom and the bat fell to the ground. It was quiet but opened and closed its wings in an attempt to fly. “Kill it!” my mom yells. At this point it was the only option, the bat was hurt, and I felt sorry for it. I still found it repulsive and scary (what if it all of a sudden could fly and flew in my face?) but managed to whack it with the broom once (it was one of those T-shaped brooms so I whacked it with the wooden end). It squealed again. It was horrible. “I can’t do this!” I yelled. My mom took a whack and it was dead. I was left with the job of getting rid of the corpse (in a way that the dogs couldn’t get at it). There on the shovel I looked at it more closely. A little grey furry thing with leathery wings, now neatly folded alongside its body. Its strange how we were both in such utter panic, me even more so than my mom. Bats should be conserved. Finland has signed a European conservation agreement I read later, but we killed this one, out of fear.