** Giveaway concluded, winner announcement here **

Topic: Share a funny/entertaining story involving chemistry from your own life, could be a kitchen accident that happened to you or someone you personally know or anecdotes from chemistry class back in school.

For the giveaway part, I have one gift code for Sokobond (GOG version) which will be given to the most entertaining story.

Please state if you're in for the giveaway or just participating in the topic. No rules except that the prize is to be redeemed by the winner to their own account. The giveaway closes in about a week.

I very much recommend the game, it's got a very clean design, super simple controls and is perfect for playing in shorter sessions. Haven't played anything at all for more than two weeks and this was ideal for getting back into things. The game starts off easy and you can coast through the first 50-60 levels in about 2,5 hours. I'm expecting the game to become a lot more difficult in the later stages but I can already say it's definitely a puzzle game worth owning.

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I can't remember much from chemistry class myself but I sure remember the teachers. We had two chemistry teachers at my school, one of them was called "The Frog" because he had a small green car once, and the other guy didn't have a nickname because he was kinda intense and people didn't want to risk giving him nicknames. Let's call him Intense Guy.

Fortunately, I wasn't in Frog's class because he had a reputation for botching most of his experiments - in ways that made sitting in the front rows a veritable health risk. I only took his geography class which was less dangerous and where most of his mishaps involved him not getting the TV or overhead projector to work. Every single time, too.

One of his most infamous chemistry experiments involved a hydrogen balloon. I did not witness it but the tale was told from one generation of students to the next and is probably being retold to this day. The problem wasn't that the balloon exploded, that was to be expected anyway. The problem was that the balloon exploded right next to a slurry tank (that's liquid animal shit which farmer's use as fertilizer) and that tank was standing at the farm right next to school. So the walls of the school got covered in manure and one can safely say that the experiment turned out pretty shitty.
Slurry tanks are dangerous, every once in a while a farmer gets unconscious due to the fumes and falls into the tank, or into the slurry pit at ground level. In both cases you'll drown in animal poop and it's perhaps the shittiest way to die.

As for my actual chemistry teacher, Intense Guy, he was respected because when he got angry he would slam his fist onto the desk so hard that everything on the desk flew off. People didn't try to cheat in his class, and those who did experienced his epic fist slam on their desks when he caught them and they never tried a second time, regardless hof how desperate they were. He was a short guy but wiry and athletic, plus he had a mustache and a rather intense stare. Same as with Frog's class, no one wanted to sit in the front row but it wasn't for fear of botched experiments or for fear of his intense stare, it was due to his body odor which was super strong and you could smell him from far away. He was a passionate free-style skier so whenever there was fresh snow outside, he got excited and wanted to go skiing rather than be in school. He used to say "I see snow and it makes me nervous. Don't piss me off today!"
Despite the body odor, he was considered to be one of the cool teachers and generally well liked. We distilled high grade absinthe in his class once, and drank it right here and then. He was a good teacher indeed.

Anyway, let's hear your stories please, fire away!

Had a mate put a tin of baked beans in the microwave,without piecing the lid.
Kaboom!!!! Extremely messy and done the oven in,couple of people got slight
burns.(not in).

I'm in, although I can't really share a funny/entertaining story, since I tried to keep myself away from chemistry as much as it was humanly possible, but I do have a depressing story to share. Who knows, maybe you'll like it. In Hungary we often say that laughing at the other persons misery is the best way to have fun :3

In elementary school 7th grade we had our first chemistry lesson. The teacher showed us some entertaining experiments, then asked who wants to come to an extra chemistry lesson once per week (starts at 7am, before normal lessons), where we will do intresting stuff we won't do during normal lessons.
Of course I volunteered! The teacher has just blown up something, this extra chemistry lesson is going to be soo much fun....not.
Turns out all we did in this extra lesson was doing maths. Chemistry related maths exercises! Nothing else! I HATE MATHS and now I volunteered to an extra maths lesson, one that starts at 7AM!! T_T
And once you signed up there was no turining back. So I continued to go to this extra "chemistry" lessong for two years >___>

In high school, my lab partner was heating up a test tube which was capped by a rubber stopper. While not aiming the top of the tube at either of us, it was unfortunately on target with a nearby group.

After a loud "POP", the rubber stopper went flying, pegging a person in the neighboring group right smartly.

The poor fellow walked around all day with a large round and red dot smack in the middle of his forehead. After we knew that he was OK, it was a herculean effort to not break out in laughter every time we saw him in our other classes that day.

I could never forget the surprised look on his face!

Funny story, hmm? Let's see. First some background.

Once upon a time, back before batteries were common and you needed to burn things for light, there was a neat little trick people used to light up vehicles at night. It was called the Carbide Lamp, and relied on a simple chemical reaction of calcium carbide (hence the name of the lamp) with water, producing acetylene gas which could then be burned. Simply put, you'd take your container of water, and then you'd measure out and add an amount of calcium carbide that more-or-less fit the time you needed light for. Longer trip, add more of the stuff, and since the reaction was an ongoing thing, it would constantly produce gas at a steady rate which could then be used to fuel a flame. No need for pesky pressurization systems or anything, just a container and a pipe to bring the gas to where you needed it.

Now, I know all this because a teacher once decided to demonstrate it for us, showing the reaction and then burning it to demonstrate that, yes, it was indeed producing a flammable gas. That part worked just fine, though he got a rather larger flame than expected. He must have been out of practise, complacently using batteries instead of the old ways, the lazy bugger. Anyway, small flame or big flame, if you're in a chemistry class you take these things in the stride, right?

Yes. But... there's this thing about acetylene gas. Some of you who know chemistry might've noticed it from the name. It's an alkyne, an unsaturated hydrocarbon. Even worse, it's not just a double bond, but a triple bond. And, well, when you burn an unsaturated hydrocarbon, it produces soot. For triple bonds, a LOT of soot. It's actually one of the ways you can test for double or triple bonds, just set fire to a sample and see what happens. And, as I mentioned before, it was a pretty big flame.

So there we were, a class of 24 eagerly awaiting the latest in old-fashioned-yet-impressive-but-perfectly-safe pyrotechnical displays, and instead we were treated to the rather unexpected phenomenon of... black snow. There were literally snowflake-sized chunks of soot falling all over the classroom. And there was our teacher, in his newly washed shirt, suddenly panicing because his wife was going to tear his head off for ruining it.

It was a fun lesson, that's for sure. So, protip: If things were once used for outdoors lighting, that doesn't necessarily mean that using them indoors is wise.

Chemistry story? Errrrr does ingesting chemicals count?

Aha, he obviously didn't pay attention in class! The poor hard-working microwaves will bounce off the metal can and when they can't get inside the food, they'll get angry and become terrorzit microwaves and then they go and kill the magnetron to punish you and bring great vengeance upon your oven.
This reminds me off the real terrorzits who tried to remote ignite a suitcase bomb via cell phone, however the cell phone on the bomb was inside a metal case... Faraday troll, won't work :'D (thankfully!) I'm sorry you got trolled and had to suffer though this boring class, many years after school I can now confidently say that math is nowhere near as useful as chemistry/physics in everyday life, all one normally needs is basic math but chemistry/physics are much more practical, especially chemistry (e.g. in the kitchen, doing laundry, do-it-yourself tasks etc etc).

Your story is somewhat scary, like a horror story or like one of my occasionally recurring nightmares where I dream that I haven't yet graduated high school and have to do finals all over. As I'm sitting there in front of my test papers, I look around at my classmates and exclaim "but...didn't we already graduate, this is madness! I can't be expected to still remember all this math stuff after so many years!" But everyone else in the dream is unaware. It's predominantly the math that makes the nightmare scary. You see, I got lucky during the real high school math finals, especially in the oral test where every student had to draw a random card with math problems on it. I drew just about the most easy one you can get and was really happy because due to excessive gaming, I had hardly any time at all to learn anything in graduation year. Graduated with plenty of buffer between my score and complete fail but my grades sank even below class average - quite a difference compared to years earlier when I had the best score of the class (because no PC of my own yet...). Anyway, perhaps I'm subconsciously feeling that I got lucky with graduation and my brain now punishes me with the occasional "failing high school" dream once every couple months (a wildly common dream many people have). I would have felt really guilty if that had happened to me unless it had been someone I didn't like anyway. Kudos for not laughing at the poor person, that would have been mean and mean people are, well...mean! Ha, that a good tip, didn't know that! In Sokobond, you get to build a lot of funny hydrocarbons and whatnot and have to navigate them around, including forming triple bonds and trying to pick up monatomic hydrogens lying around in awkward places and once you add them to your molecule thing you then have to try not to get stuck due to parts of your Frankenstein compound bumping into walls. That side of things is more generic puzzle than chemistry but the bonds and components seem accurate enough in the game. If I recall corectly, I already had to form an acetylene compound in at least one of the levels but to be honest I don't pay too much attention to the resulting compounds, I just try to solve the puzzles. Misappropriate outdoor lighting stuff for indoor demo = black snow + angry wife, got it! Now if I can split the black snow and anger from the compound, I could create a wife out of simple calcium carbide and water? That's easier to get than a spare rib, perhaps worth a try! If an entertaining story came out of it, sure! Preferably not just "I drank many beers and then puked" but something more in-depth would be nice to read.

Not in, but I do have a couple of stories from chemistry class.

My chemistry teacher was... Well, he was insane, sort of. A very nice man, to be sure, very polite and very enthusiastic. Sometimes, a little too enthusiastic. His nickname was "Bomb-[his name]". Not only did the students call him that, the other teachers did too, and he signed all the assignments he gave us with a little clipart of a bomb with a lit fuse, a dash and then his name. You can imagine where his main interest in chemistry lay.

The very first lesson I had with him, he took the plastic bag out of the trash can, filled it with propane (or possibly butane), twisted the opening shut and laid it on the desk. Then he put a lit bunsen burner next to the opening and threw his chemistry book onto the bag. The resulting fireball probably took the eyebrows off the people on the front row, but it was undeniably an excellent example of an exothermic reaction.

At one point in the school year we were learning about pyrochemistry. We learned how to make flames of different colors, how to make fuses, how to make things that went "boom"... One day he brought a plastic jar to class. He explained that it was an extremely finely granulated and extremely pure pyrochemical mixture he had ordered from a chemistry lab in Switzerland, and he wanted to demonstrate it for us. So we went out to the soccer field behind the school. He put down the jar and took the lid off, and instructed us to stand about 30 meters away from it in a semi-circle. He then made a chemical fuse (I seem to remember zinc powder and glycerol, but I can't find any reference to this combination, so I'm probably wrong). He then turned and started to walk away from the jar, saying "It should take about 30 sec-" ***KA-BOOOOOOM!!!*** Fortunately he wasn't hurt, but we could feel the pressure wave of the explosion even though we were significantly further away from the center of it than he was. When we looked over at the school, the windows were lined with students and teachers. When we got back inside we were told that all the windows had been vibrating like crazy.

Honestly, making things go boom is one of the key elements of teaching chemistry in school. In fact, it's literally something aspiring chemistry teachers are taught as part of their studies (at least around here).

One day we came to the chemistry lab, right after another class had finished, and it smelled as if someone has poured petrol all over a latrine. Or someone has shit all over a gas station; we couldn't decide.

Any idea what they could have been doing?

Not in by the way. Thanks +1.

I broke few test-tubes in chemistry lab and right when I was going to throw away from window I was caught.
Although I was only scolded by him but good thing is I was not caught smuggling chemicals from lab. =P

Not in, but since I am indeed studying Chermistry, I find this to be an interesting topic.

I remember my first year on university. One day at the lab, we were doing quite simple experiments about dissolving metals. Interesting, yet a little boring and repetitive until we got to concentrated acids.
At that time, I didn't really knew how security equipment worked and assumed that my fume hood was on (it was off of course). My next assigment was to cover a nail in nitric acid and write down what happened.
What wasn't expected is that my nail was extremely pure and polished, therefore when I added the hot nitric acid, the test tube began to get really hot. I didn't know much practical Chemistry back then, but I knew that wasn't right. It became obvious when that little test tube became a little chimney, spitting green fumes all over. Thankfully, I was able to stop it before someone was killed or worse, the teacher saw and blablaed me. It was fun.

Another potentially fatal event happened while doing some organic synthesis. You must know that, in an O-chem lab, 99.9 % of stuff is transparent and looks like water. If you have ever smelled organic solvents and concentrated acids, they are pretty "intense". So, some guys sniffs around wondering what was the source of the smell. He sees two beakers and asks our irresponsible protagonist to go to the fume hood to handle that stuff. They began arguing. "It's only water", did our guy defend. "Just to make sure", insisted the other random guy. This lasted a few minutes, enough for everybody in the lab to notice them (teachers included).
Then, suddenly, our crazy protagonist drinks the whole content of the beaker. Everybody's heart stopped for a second. He smiles and says: "See, only water".
Not to mention the teacher ran to him, saying stuff teachers don't usually say and insta-flunked him. It was funny though.

I don't have any good stories about chemistry, though I do find it an interesting subject.
I do have a fun fact though; practically every soda pop can has a different chemical lining on the inside. This is to stop the liquid from making holes in the can. Every different kind has to have a special solution made that will stop that drink's particular contents from destroying the aluminum.
I read it in an article somewhere, if I can find it I'll post a link.

Not in. Have a lot of weird chemistry stories, but was never overly fond of the subject.
I remember our lab guy was a bit bonkers. He once dumped sodium down the sink and poured water after it..I think all the pipes burst :D. He also made a complete gross mess of a dissection (although that's more related to biology, so a story for another time, I guess). We used to call him Squeaky Bob, because that is what he told us happens when testing for hydrogen.
We used to completely game the lab, though. Like if we were testing salts, then instead of laboriously going through the entire procedure, we'd just get get some solution off the shelf that was the right colour (red for iron and blue for copper I still remember), and say "Found the metal!".

Well, there was this one girl, and I thought there is some chemistry between us.

Not much of a story, but she though it was hilarious.