War of the wash bottles

A synthesis lab is like a shared house. You get a collection of usually unrelated people – both in a sense of not having any familial ties as well as not sharing character traits – that reside in the same space and argue over who’s taking out the trash. And, just like in any shared house, the lab is a place where ideas of tidiness and sharing clash.

There are those ultra-tidy chemists that keep flasks sorted by size, NMR tube caps arranged by colour and all spatulas aligned north (although I was told that this isn’t merely obsessive tidiness but part of an ancient occult ritual to appease the chemistry gods). Others happily work around piles of flasks with mostly unknown content. These miscreants don’t think twice about setting up a reaction next to a syringe with needle still attached poking out from under a piece of blue roll. Some would call it a safety hazard; to them, it’s merely a deterrent for nosy colleagues.