We spent the first part of the week running preliminary experiments (think tap water and laboratory air, and gas standards) with our instruments that just finished getting assembled to see how they're working and make adjustments if possible. On Wednesday I started packing up all the lab equipment into crates and finished with this yesterday. Yesterday afternoon our whole lab went into Ship It Out mode to get our 8 large heavy cases down to the loading docks and strap everything to pallets. This morning we packed away our Hazmat gas cylinders.
This is a pretty good story..Eric was de-icing our mini fridge yesterday around lunchtime and accidentally hit the cooling agent cylinder with his screwdriver/ice pick and gas went flying out..the fridge was totally broken. So anyway, he went out and got a new one last night and so this morning, there was an empty new fridge box in our lab.
It must have been too early in the morning, b/c John had a pretty terrible idea this morning that I should pack up the 4 heavy gas cylinders we are shipping as Hazmat in the fridge box! He gave me some soft sheets of foam and told me to just be crrative, yada yada. I thought hazmat must not be too big a deal or something. I didn't realize it was doomed to begin with until he came to check on my handiwork and realized the cardboard was way to flimsy for those heavy 2000 psi tanks. When I stepped away from it, I saw that the loads duct tape I deemed necessary for reinforcement combined with pictures on the box of glasses of juice and people eating cheesecake made the box look..anything but serious. And John admitted that Hazmat should not look like a joke. Within an hour, our great lab fam had remedied the situation and placed the cylinders horizontally in a large plastic cooler, lined snugly with thick styrofoam blocks. Ready to go!! John started singing a Spinners song about a ghetto child while we re-packaged.
Everything will be picked up in a few hours and FedExed to Fairbanks, arriving a few hours before John and I do next Thurs.
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