So in making my frankenprotein, I have to gel purify the PCR reactions. In other words, I've made a lot of copies of the DNA (PCR) and now I want it to be nice and shiny and clean (gel purify) before the assembly tonight. So I needed to pour a big, big gel. I was looking at the rectangular gel box trying to decide what volume it was. Naturally, I could have measured it with a ruler and calculated it. Or, I could have just poured water into the box and seen how milliliters it took to fill. Or, I could do what any good graduate student would do and say, it looks like 400 mLs and call it good. Fact was, it was good. When I poured the liquid agarose into the box for casting, it was perfect. As I stood in the cold room admiring my work, I thought, "I'm ready to graduate." Then, the tape on the sides of the casting tray started leaking and about 200 mLs of agarose laden with toxic EtBr went all over the counter. I was laughing pretty hard as I swabbed the entire counter with paper towels. Ready to graduate? Not so much. Ready to go home for Christmas? Absolutely!
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See, you are trying too hard. Pull out the calipers and measure the thickness of the plastic. Then pull out the ruler, and measure the dimensions of the box. This will allow you to measure the volume of plastic involved in the container. Now start pushing the container (open side up, unless you want to do down, which would still work, but you would have to compensate for the compression of the air) into at overflowing container of water (making sure to catch all the spill) just until the water flows into the container we are measuring. The amount of water that fell out of the container, minus the volume of the plastic is the volume of the container. Once computed, you can run around the building shouting Eureka!
As you may know, I hung out quite a bit in the Chemistry building up at the U toward the end, and one day the fire alarm starts going off, and we dutifully file out of the building. Well, here is what happened.
A graduate student was pouring a low grade radioactive fluid from one container to another, and completely missed all over his shoes. Now, they had containment/cleanup materials in the lab in which he was working, but instead of that, he starts wandering the halls, up and down stairs and elevators looking for someone to help him clean up. At the end of it all, he contaminated half the building and had to send in the hazmat teams.
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