Toxic cloud of ... stuff...

I'm amused. Part of my lab is a wet lab where there are deadly combinations of chemicals for some of the experiments. Under normal safe operating procedures, the chemicals are handled underneath laboratory ventilation hoods, and behind safety glass.

However, I've come to notice that the building that houses my lab seems to go under the occasional blackouts. This means the ventilation hoods stop working. This means that each time there is a power failure, everyone in the lab (and the building as well) needs to evacuate to prevent death and destruction.

I'm not sure if it's the two computing GRIDS we have up, or the near 100 Terabytes (that's 100,000 Gigabytes) of hard drives, or the multiple servers, switches, routers and computers we have up and running that sucks the juice out of the building. In any case, I find it amusing. Today's blackout encompassed the entire medical part of campus - one eatery, one admin building, 4 research buildings, and a lecture hall were all out of commission.