Re: No explosives in the tech support room
Back in the day worked in a radiation protection department of a large hospital as a physicist. There were all sorts of rules about how waste should be stored, brought into our department and disposed of (as you can imagine).
One department consisting of a load of chemistry and biology post docs called down one day. The had 5 drums of liquid radiation waste
(there is a type of detection you can do called scintillation, you dissolve your sample in a powerful organic solvent and other things, and then you can count the beta particle reactions. The little vials this creates are radioactive, chemically hazardous, and potentially biologically hazardous).
The drums were really thick plastic, and could only be used for (x months - can't remember) to be safe from being dissolved by the solvent.
We told them to bring them down and we'd dispose.
Cue hell!
They weren't storing this stuff in drums, but in red biowaste bags. Not only that, but these bags were stuffed to the top (even though they are never meant to be more than half full to allow for proper closure). They were very heavy, so they DRAGGED these bags through the damn hospital to my department where they sat in a heap leaking fluid.
I was the junior physicist. I basically had a jaw drop moment as I'm trying to take in what I'm seeing. As it dawns on me that they've just contaminated many meters of corridors, not to mention contaminating a lab room with a number of experiments running.
At which point big boss man comes in - and I've never seen him give people such a hard time. How was it possible so many chemistry PhDs were unaware of the effect of toluene on thin plastic. How were they unaware of how to deal with such material. And what in the name of holy fuck were they doing dragging a wide swathe of hazardous material through our hospital.
I was told to clean it up, and he went back with them to have "words" with their supervisor.
I then spent the next x hours firstly getting the vials into drums (not easy as the bags had basically melted, so I had to gather hundreds of very slippery vials by hand) and then going through their travel route with swabs and decon 90 cleaning up the radioactive pathway.
A department of very clever people - who were also deeply, deeply dumb. Their reasoning - they though they were saving the cost of the black drums by just using the plastic bags!!!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
