wandering through shelf after shelf of dusty old periodicals, i finally find an article pertinent to my research in the june 1985 volume of the journal of chemical education. i plop down on one of those little stools and pull out my laptop to type up the relevant bits. i decide the whole article might actually be a useful thing to have, and fortunately there are photocopiers in the basement. but instead of taking dimes, they take these "copy cards" that you have to put money on, so i leave the journal downstairs and go back upstairs to get a copy card. it says to recycle the used ones and save the world, so i take a used one from the top of the machine, put it in, put in my dollar bill, and oh it gives me a new card. and the old one back. uh, great?
so i go downstairs to copy my three-page article, and oh, hey. apparently they use dust instead of ink in these photocopy machines and i end up with smudgy fingers and a smudgy photocopy. it's tough work being a fume cupboard researcher.
nerd.