• Question: What is your funniest moment in science?

    Asked by Midgley to Carolyn, Peter, Richard, Sara, Siana on 10 Nov 2015.
    • Photo: Carolyn Nielsen

      Carolyn Nielsen answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      I’m not sure this is the funniest moment but it’s one of the first ones I thought of… during my Biology undergraduate degree we dissected big fish which was really interesting as you could see how all the organs were arranged. The only problem was, as you can guess, we smelled really, really bad afterwards! We all had another class to go to next and everyone moved away from us in the classroom. When I got back to my university accommodation I didn’t want to keep my lab coat in my bedroom so I threw it out the window into the garden, but missed the clothes line. I forgot about it for a few days and when I remembered it didn’t smell anymore but it had a lot of muddy grass stains!

    • Photo: Peter Francis

      Peter Francis answered on 10 Nov 2015:

      Watching people new to an exercise programme struggle to squat during one of our exercise interventions.

    • Photo: Richard Unwin

      Richard Unwin answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      I used to work for a charity funded laboratory and we would regularly host visits by the old ladies who worked in fundraising shops. One time, a colleague set up a game where he spent days finding out the costs of all the equipment in the laboratory, making little signs and covering them up with post-it notes so he could play ‘Guess the Price’ with them. He assumed they’d all be amazed at how much some of the equipment cost. He was most upset when they guessed nearly every single one (we never found out who told them in adavnce…..)!

    • Photo: Sara Falcone

      Sara Falcone answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      I had to collect some pee from a dog that had diabetes type 2. People and animals with diabetes urinate more often, but no matter how long I walked her around in the garden of the hospital, she wouldn’t pee. So I stopped one second to check the time and at the very same moment she peed. In my sock. I don’t know how but she manege to get all the pee IN my shoe. I hated that dog >_<
      (my colleague and boss also wanted me to tell the story of when I got stuck with an arm IN a horse for 30 min… but that might not be appropriate xD)

    • Photo: Siana Jones

      Siana Jones answered on 11 Nov 2015:

      Old folks do quite a lot of funny things so it’s hard to pick one moment from my time working with them..

      Recently, a lovely elderly gentleman came in to do an exercise test, when I put the face-mask on him to measure his breathing, he thought it would be funny to pretend to be a fighter-jet pilot so he spent the rest of the session saying things like ‘over and out’, ‘do you copy me?’ and ‘coming in for landing’. He didn’t do a very good exercise test.

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