ehhh msds labels make you think everything is dangerous, read the one for water.

dunno this is pretty bad if you ask me

this doesn't really look like fun either

u gon die

well at least i won't have to repay as much for my loans

is you died?

not yet

give it a week

Reminds me of when I worked at a car detailing place and using the acid cleaner on rims. As one of my coworkers put it that stuff just smelled like cancer.

hahahaha that's terrible

DDD:

i think this broke my addiction to reading labels on everything i own.
also maaaybe you should wear one of those painters filter masks like this one? no idea if it would actually help tho. http://i.imgur.com/hbotfWz.jpg

btw, i searched everywhere but there is no S.w.5 just skips from 4 to 6, or i'm just blind, but i do love to read these.

Probably not. Those are designed to filter particles, like dust and mold. HNO3 isn't a very big molecule, and would just pass through.

Just working under a fume vent/hood would probably work though.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/11679695/ it's right here :p

there is a fume hood but there's too much crap in it, plus given the length of the pipettes i wouldn't be able to hold the pipette AND clean it at the same time while having the hood down, since it's supposed to go no higher than your elbows if you can help it

it's not actually that bad, the fumes, but it really makes me wonder...

Hope you'll get paid sick-days at least... when you get intoxicated

lol i don't get sick pay

You should... considering what dangerous materials you're working with D=

as it is i have the best-paying workstudy job so hey

Sick-pay included in wage, then?

Your little comic strips are soo awesome and well drawn.

:>

Don't worry, according to the World Health Organization, breathing air is going to give us all cancer: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013.....99G0BB20131017

We're all gonna die. ^^

whelp

I love this coloring style so much

:3

So do you dip the dirty pipettes directly into the bottle of acid or is the pipette in the image just the one to take some out of the bottle? ;D

Anyway, yeah. Nitric acid. Fun stuff, isn't it? XD We used it back in school to make nitric acid which we used to make gun cotton.
Did I mention that we had the best chemistry teacher ever in 12th and 13th grade?

right into the acid. we have a bottle of acid reserved specifically for cleaning pipettes (sometimes burettes, but i'm not 100% on that).

13th grade lol

Ahh I see. We didn't have that in the lab, the assistants would have killed us for doing that :P

Yeah, 13th grade^^ When I went to school that's how it worked. Here in Germany when you leave elementary school (which takes 4 years) you can choose one of three schools you can go to after that. To one of them you go for 5 years and it gives you the most basic education of them all (and no job at the end :V), the other one is 6 years long and gives you a slightly more advanced education.
I went to an "academy high school" for 9 years, there you get a far more advanced education and when you are done it enables you to go to a university.
They changed it though, my youngest sister has to go there for 8 years now instead of 9.

it's what i'm told to do if there's base crystal shit stuck in the tips. label even says it's only for cleaning during, and only for certain conditions. for anything else, we use an ultrasonic/cavitation bath. i've had to clean several pipettes with acid. all i have to do when i'm done is rinse the everloving hell out of them.

also that's a lot different than here, i gotta say. interesting though.

It does make sense to have a bottle like that around. But natric acid is also quite dangerous, so that's also one more thing for people to screw up.
I remember when a student left an open bottle of an organic acid lying around. Holy shit, they were FURIOUS XD

It really is very different. But it is has many advantages. Like when your results at the academy high school aren't good you can "go back" to one of the other schools for the time being. When you graduated there you can go back to the academy high school or try get a job.
One disadvantage of the academy high school is that you go to school until you are about 19 or 20...

oh and if it helps to know there isn't much in the bottle at all, really just enough to use for cleaning. it's not used very often, either. considering those and the fact that it's used as a second-to-last resort (and then rewashed of course) it's really not a big deal. i only have to use it maybe once or twice a month at most, and it's changed out every so often.

That makes even more sense.
If you know what you are doing working with nitric acid is relatively harmless compared to working with other chemicals.
But unfortunately not many people know what they are doing >__> When we were doing our thing in the anorganic lab I grabbed a bottle of potassium dichromate that someone was working with. The bottle was SOAKED with that stuff and I got it all over my hands! Potassium dichromate is VERY toxic, carcinogenic and a strong environmental toxin. And my whole right hand was covered with it. Yay.
Now you could say it was my fault because I didn't wear gloves but we actually were not supposed to wear gloves because they wanted us to be careful. Also, when you do wear gloves and a substance that can penetrate the gloves get's on them you only notice it when it's far too late.

only my supervisor and i ever use it, but i've also worked in the stockroom for over a year now. i don't just use it for everything and the concentration, even contaminated, would be enough to give me some really nasty burns. but since it's only used for cleaning we don't pour it out or anything so there's nothing on the sides, etc, you get the idea.

i wear gloves at work (and occasionally goggles) but i deal with lower-level chem classes, 100 and 200 levels. i think the worst i've had to do was clean out bottles of different concentrations of NaOH, one of them being 10M. that was pretty terrifying.

Oh yes, NaOH can be terrifying.
The worst thing that happened to me was when I grabbed a bottle of concentrated H2O2. Just like the potassium dichromate that bottle was soaked with the stuff as well... That guy did not know how to work properly.
Anyway, I grabbed the bottle and soon after that my hand started to feel tingly. When I looked at it my whole hand was just completely white. Not covered with it, but it essentially bleached my skin XD
That was scary. Especially since I didn't know that the effect wears off after 20 minutes or so.

if people here got the outsides soaked in contents they'd be screamed at by their lab instructors.

yeah H2O2 is weird. i had a lab in high school where i had to use it and i was like "wtf i'm whiter than usual".

Oh he did get screamed at. By me. I did NOT enjoy having my hand coated with a dichromate >__>