That Guy Is Very Well Respected In Our Cohort Now - Tumblr Posts

since y'all like enviro sci stories so much...

in one of our courses we were testing the water of one of the on-campus ponds. a quick, easy example of practical water quality testing without having to go too far.

unfortunately, this pond water was only accessible via bridge. not a deep pond, and not a high bridge, but that meant to get the samples, we would need a Contraption. and despite being a well-respected university with a lot of expensive lab equipment... our Water Sampling Contraption was a bottle on a rope (weighed down by a piece of metal, so it would sink). and it was... a well-used Contraption, to say the least.

so it should not surprise you when i say that when the very first person lowered it off the bridge, the rope snapped (it didn't come untied, it actually broke). and this bottle (weighed down by a sizeable metal brick) fell into the pond.

of course, everyone heard the commotion, and the entire class (which was not many) was faced with figuring out how we were going to get it back. (our prof, god love him, was about three hundred years old and of no help whatsoever).

but fret not! sure enough, one brave young man (not me) rose to the occasion. and by "rose to the occasion", i mean he took off his shoes and climbed onto the railing, preparing to jump into the pond otherwise fully clothed (labcoat and all!)

i wish this story had a cool ending where he actually had to swim to get the sampler. but the professor yelled at him to stop and this story actually ends with my lab partner and me running to find a groundskeeper, asking for something we could use to fish the sampler out, and him (very confusedly) handing us a tree trimmer.