Well, here is the whole story, including the clandestine agreements leading up to this incident...

The higher ups at my company, and more specifically, our notoriously stingy owner, have continuously refused to provide us with adequate engineering controls (i.e. positive pressure ventilation, or, well, any form of actual ventilation up to and including working vent hoods). So when we get anything in that could possibly be fatal, we are (to an extent) unequipped for proper handling of said material... we finally got non-reactive gloves for the potential spill of liquid Bromine, and new ventilation (slightly) in the octane room for the operation of our cetane motor (which would, previously, leak out unfiltered diesel exhaust fumes into a room that is no bigger then 12x15 feet). As well, our company has a booming additives division that will take any job that they see fit (and by fit, I mean, turns six figure profit for only a couple hours of work), and then have the lab run all of the blends needed to adequately determine how much additive they need to put in the product to get the desired results. Well... about 2 weeks ago, we had a sample arrive, without warning, that contained hydrogen sulfide... it was, as described by the client, "a hydrocracked lubricating oil". Ok, whatever... so a guy on my shift goes to perform the drager test (basically, a tube that you crack open, and then use a hand pump to suck the vapors off of the product through the tube, and the contents of the tube will react with whatever you are looking for, and will show the amount of whatever based on the distance traveled of the reaction... in simpler terms, the tube changes color if whatever is present, and the distance the color change travels denotes the amount of the whatever is present) and almost instantly the lab fills with the smell of rotten eggs... all of us experienced enough to recognize the smell, yell at him, and he closes the sample bottle. I move the sample to a fume hood and I go to read the hydrogen sulfide content... it maxes out the 0-200 ppm tube, and then maxes out the 0-2000 ppm tube... so I pull out the big boy 0-7%, or 0-70000ppm, tube and it reads 2% hydrogen sulfide in vapor. Ok... so I then run a hydrogen sulfide in liquid test, and get the result, and we send it to the client. Well... apparently, our additives division had talked to this client and had told them we could fix their hydrogen sulfide problem and, without warning us, agreed to do a job for them... which the lab was not physically set up to handle. We do the dosing and experiments to them, largely at risk for our own lives, and give them what they need to do the dosing... a week later, we get the treated sample in (still containing extremely high amounts of hydrogen sulfide in vapor) and through our testing, show that the additives have more or less removed the hydrogen sulfide suspended in the sample, along with a good majority of the mercaptan sulfur. Well... fast forward to Thursday... the lab gets a 2 hour heads up that a sample will arrive that contains high amounts of hydrogen sulfide. The samples arrive and they are tested via the drager test, to find out how much was in vapor form... only to find that the samples maxed out the 7% drager tube... and then our coordinator for the job finally admitted that the hydrogen sulfide present in the sample exceeded 20% in vapor and that he recommends not taking the sample into the lab. Alright, cool... so the night crew tests it and they go one about their business. Well, I come in Friday night on my first day on shift to find these boxes sitting outside the lab door... and I'm given the story about what happened and what not and told not to move the bottles... well, 3 hours into a shift, the sky pisses over everything, including these boxes, and to try and avoid a potentially dangerous spill they begin to move the boxes inside (dragging them, not lifting, since the cardboard was already falling apart), when one of the bottles falls onto its side and quite literally explodes due to the pressure build up caused by having that much hydrogen sulfide in vapor. Thankfully, here is where everything went right... I heard the bottle breaking and ran out of the octane room to be greeted by the smell, they inform me of what happened but that the bottle broke just outside of our doors, so while I ran up front to grab a portable hydrogen sulfide monitor, they pulled the door shut where the break happened and scrambled about to find our gas masks. I run back into the lab with the monitor and over to the door... it doesn't go off, meaning that ambient presence of hydrogen sulfide was below 5ppm (or the monitor isn't working)... I continue to finish my octanes prior to evacuating the lab with everyone else... no one died (thankfully), but myself and a coworker both got extremely nauseated and dizzy from our inhalation of the h2s... which subsides about 48 hours after the fact (your body can cope with h2s, but it takes time for it to process it out).

Anyways... that is the whole story, i'm fine... just hoping that the higher ups will recognize this as a severe problem and will take steps to fix our lab up to help prevent what could end, next time, in someone's death.