A new day, a new cock-up.

Nothing much of note happened yesterday, although I did spend a full 11 hours in the lab. Alas, when I finally got through the door at around 8:30pm I had what can only be described as writer’s block, possibly due to the fact I had only eaten soup all day. Considering I am what some people describe as fairly hefty, this was just not cutting it and I proceeded to eat everything I had left in my all but bare cupboards. I then put my gym stuff in the washing machine, sat down to watch the football and came back an hour later to find all my clothes along with an impeccably clean, although completely waterlogged MP3 player. This began an approximately 20 minute swear-a-thon which crescendoed when I realised I had also lost my student I.D. card. This means I can’t go to the gym or get into the department out of normal working hours for the next few days while some jobsworth with a computer makes me a new card and then charges me £10 for the privilege of picking it up.

I have spent the last few days getting ever closer to one of my target molecules and thus far have had a reasonably high success to failure ratio. Three steps went reasonably well up until this morning when I had half a gram of colourless oil which I spent yesterday afternoon purifying. An all too uncommon successful recrystallisation gave me nice shiny colourless crystals. Having then carefully filtered, dried and weighed said crystals, I then decided the best course of action would be to throw them all over myself instead of placing them in the intended labelled glass vial I had on the bench. Ten minutes of stamping round the lab with a face like a slapped arse later I managed to salvage at least some of them and put them on for the penultimate step of my synthesis. Whether or not that works in now in the hands of the chemistry gods, but I am assured by a paper with no experimental procedures, NMR data, or supporting information of any kind that it is a “facile transformation”. I am an unlucky person by nature, so this will probably prove to be a downright lie. I wait with baited breath.

Thursday afternoon in the department means we have a problem session with my supervisor and the majority of the postgraduates from my floor. Normally, there is at least one monumental balls-up in each session which then means the rest of the people in there get a good chance to get some group heckling done for an hour before everyone returns to their respective labs and stops talking to one another for another week. I have taken the liberty of drawing for you a personal favourite of mine from last year which came out of the mind of an unnamed but moderately intelligent Masters student. The mechanism in question was an m-CPBA epoxidation. As the chemists among you will know, this is not a difficult thing to grasp. This is the correct one:

If you don't understand this, don't worry because neither did the guy who had studied nearly four years of a chemistry degree. This is the dross that came out of the mind of the previously mentioned MSc student. Yes, that is a single molecule of oxygen you can see, just floating around in the reaction minding its own business. Also, after seeing that excellent piece of addition in the first step, who says chemists can’t do maths?

 

Needless to say, he was swiftly and brutally corrected by everyone else in the room who hadn’t taken their stupid pills that day. Unfortunately, nothing particularly ridiculous happened today and the session passed without anyone making a fool of themselves. Now the term is in full swing and problem classes are a regular occurrence, I’ll do my best to keep everyone posted on anything strange that comes out of them in the forthcoming weeks.