Christmas SALES and credit crunch

I went to do some shopping today. I had some things I needed to buy and as I got paid earlier – some additional cash to spend. To my surprise I came home almost empty handed (if you know me even a little bit, you know that it’s rather shocking). It seem that credit crunch hit the shop owners more than I thought. Sales this year are much smaller that last year. Most of the things are discounted only a little (or at least, most of the things I wanted to buy). Seriously, discount from £59.99 to £55.99 is not really worth standing in a queue. And you could see the results in most of the shops. Queues to the tills were rather short, most of the people were just browsing, or buying just one thing. Most of the shops weren’t much busier than on normal Saturday. Usually during the Sales time shops are packed, people are loaded with shopping, four shopping bags in each hand and some more shopping stuffed under their arms (that’s often me :D). Today I haven’t seen a single person like that. Some shops didn’t really bother discounting their stuff, they just put the Sale banners up and left the same prices. Only Next seem to have a usual “Everything must go” sale, but even there I didn’t have to queue. Which is a good thing, cuz stuff I bought wasn’t on Sale anyways.

The only thing that stopped that day from being a complete disaster, was my visit in the bookshop (looking for the non-existing discounts – uuuh, 75% off “Aunt Marge’s Cooking Book” how exciting – none of the interesting stuff was discounted though). There, in the middle of the Sci-Fi section, next to “The Asbo Fairy Tales” I’ve found diet book - “I can make you thin”. Putting in SF section isn’t probably the best advertisement, but at least won’t give anyone any delusions.

Little Asia - Crystallisation gambit

If you read my previous post, you know that we have been blessed with two new PhD students this year. One of them – C. doesn’t seem to have any idea about chemistry. At first we’ve thought that maybe it’s the cultural difference and the difficulty in adaptation to the new environment (or at least I thought so, some other members are much less tolerant). But then the crystallisation incident happened and no one had any doubt anymore. C. hasn’t got a clue.

Let’s start from the beginning; The first reaction C. performed was reduction of D-phylglycine to get aminoalcohol. This is a routine reaction in our group, the prep is very easy and has been performed multiple times. Our postdoc L. helped C. to set up the reaction (haven’t seen that, but I suspect that L. set up the reaction for her). Obtained product, if you’re doing it on a small scale, is a white solid, easily recrystallised from hot toluene. At this step L. had already enough (pretty sure I’ve seen steam coming from her ears) and left C. to finish on her own. You think how difficult that can be, crystallisation is something you do in primary school, with kitchen salt. You dissolve it in hot solvent, wait until it cools down and voila… But… it seems that in Malaysia crystallisation is performed in slightly different (possibly revolutionary) way.

Malaysian recrystallisation procedure.

• 1 Round Bottom Flask with your product
• 1 Beaker (larger than the RBF)
• Ice (Dry Ice if necessary)

Place your RBF upside down inside the beaker (your solid shouldn’t fall out – it’s held in there by Malaysian voodoo). Fill the beaker with ice and stare at it for an hour. If your solid is not recrystallising, try topping up the beaker with dry ice.

I’m afraid I don’t know what happens next, because at this stage our supervisor came and showed C. how to do the  recrystallisation in the usual way (read recrystallised her product for her). I’m actually really upset, ‘cause this way he deprived us a chance to learn something new.

Stay tuned for the next episode.

Little Asia

Someone told me I should start writing down all the amusing little stories about my lab, to keep the for the generations to come. So I decided to do so, starting today.

Let’s start from the beginning, this October our group suddenly got much bigger. We got two new PhD students, three new MChems and an exchange student from Singapore. Theoretically, they should have all  started work in October (except the exchange student, she started a little bit earlier). In reality, we haven’t really seen them that much ‘cause apparently they all had more important stuff to do then their degrees. The exchange student, let’s call her Y., showed up for few hours on the first day and then she took the next day off to do some shopping. Apparently she had some serious purchases planned, because we haven’t seen her for the next five weeks. Our new PhD students, L. from China and C. from Malaysia (however in the beginning we were convinced she’s from Thailand) started right away. First week they had to attend all the stupid introductory training and seminars that all the starting PhD students have to in the beginning (me and S. (other PhD that started the same time as me) skipped most of those, under an excuse that we’ve already done most of them before (S. did her undergrad degree here and I was here three years ago as an exchange student)). Then, in the second week of the term, all the Graduate School courses have started. And those two apparently took an ambition to participate in all of them; Women empowerment in PhD, Self Motivation, Creative Nose Picking and other crap like that. In the spare time they started “working” in the lab. Subsequently we have discovered some surprising facts about them. We’ve already knew that L. knowledge of English is somewhat limited, however we haven’t suspected how much. Basically, most of the time he wasn’t able to understand what we were saying to him, however we haven’t discovered that right away, because when you talk to him, he always nods and says “Yes, yes”. But after few times someone told him to do something and the he did something completely different, we started to suspect that “Yes, yes” might actually mean “I have no idea what you just said to me, you capitalistic pig”. So the next conversation looked something like that:

-So you know what to do?

–Yes, yes.

-Are you lying to me?

-Yes, yes.

-You have no idea what I’ve just said.

-Yes, yes.

Problem with L. is that he doesn’t really ask questions. He does things wrong way (which can be very dangerous in chemistry lab) and even if you tell him the right way, he’ll either not understand you or ignore you, ‘cause he knows better anyways…

Gosh, it’s 3am – I’ll continue on some other day.