Another anecdote (because it's Friday): We hired a chemist from a big rocket company into our computer company. He designed organic flammable compounds (rocket fuel) that got made in a clean room in vats and packed into tubes by technicians. They scraped the rapidly-hardening stuff with paddles and smeared it into the tubes. If they left any, the vat was toast and had to be replaced.
So they would try really hard to get it all, scraping the sides and sometimes jamming the paddle down on recalcitrant bits to get them unstuck.
My friend was very nervous about this, and so looked for another job, which was how I met him.
Not long after he was working with us, he got a call and turned white. He explained: the fellow hired in after him was standing behind a technician when the batch went up, turning them both into crackly bits of toast. That could have been him.
Anyway, no I'm not cut out to be an organic chemist.
Thank you for sharing this story. It's easy to think the well-educated/professional/R&D/STEM-academia fields are devoid of danger - they are for the most part - but survival and safety is not a solved problem in many niches of these domains.
I walk through a high-tech, massive industrial factory most days I go into the office. I find it harder to remember to look for wires and forklifts than I did when I was in roles closer to the danger. It's clearly a "natural" risk-analysis response, but risk doesn't go to zero, nor should the individual ever completely export their risk management to confidence in systems, processes, and organizations.
The key-cards and clean rooms and smart people can lead us to forget these things.
So they would try really hard to get it all, scraping the sides and sometimes jamming the paddle down on recalcitrant bits to get them unstuck.
My friend was very nervous about this, and so looked for another job, which was how I met him.
Not long after he was working with us, he got a call and turned white. He explained: the fellow hired in after him was standing behind a technician when the batch went up, turning them both into crackly bits of toast. That could have been him.
Anyway, no I'm not cut out to be an organic chemist.