4 ms·

The same thing that happens when someone quits. The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as

The same thing that happens when someone quits. The people finding these things have the same skill sets and access to the same handling/disposal facilities as the people leaving these things so it's very much a "oh my former coworker forgot to/didn't have an opportunity to dispose of X before departing, I'll just do it myself in the same manner he would have". Furthermore, these people have lives, they go on vacation and cover each other. The institutional knowledge of how to handles dangerous organic things necessarily exists in the institutions that do so.

dekhn 5y ago
No bench chemist should attempt to cleanup this stuff. Go to your university or company EHS, and if you don;'t have that, your city does. The history of chemistry is filled with responsible and intelligent organic chemists who nonetheless died terrible deaths. EHS has strategies to avoid this.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Humor us all and think another few steps ahead. And what's EHS gonna do? They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it. EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Yes, I know how these things work, as my coworkers were those EHS people. The point is that they had training, and they are working within an official university context (laws, etc).
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      So why not save everyone the week of back and fourth emails while nothing gets done and ask them directly how they want to deal with it rather than putting tons of people on blast and substantially constraining their options by bringing intra-organization politics into the mix?
      - QuercusMax 5y ago
        Sounds like a great way to get Normalization of Deviance[1]. One senior person says "I know how to dispose of this, so it's OK if I don't go through proper channels." Then the next person, following their lead without understanding the implications, says "Joe Senior over there disposed of something scary they found without wasting time going through EHS, so I'll do the same." Maybe it goes fine for a while, but eventually you'll end up with a situation where you've poisoned the groundwater or released dangerous chemicals into the air, because nobody is following the proper channels any more. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
        throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Telling your boss or relevant colleague instead of going over everyone's heads from the get go isn't normalization of deviance and we both know it. I really dislike these sorts of "name drop" comments. They're just equivalent of "F" or "the front fell off" with a high enough brow for HN veneer on top.
        QuercusMax 5y ago
        You're suggesting that people bypass official procedures and/or laws in order to save time. This is a bad path to start down. The fact that you're posting this as a throwaway indicates that you don't want your HN account associated with these proposals. Here's a relevant software-related analogy: I work in a situation where if we receive certain types of data, we have to go through proper procedures (including an official incident response team). It would be very easy for me to say "I've verified that nobody accessed this data, and we can just delete it," instead of going through the proper channels, which are VERY annoying and require a bunch of paperwork, possibly meetings, etc. Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach. And then people go back through the records, and both the junior engineer and I get fired for bypassing the procedures which we've been trained on, all because I wanted to save some time.
mcguire 5y ago
This is how you wind up spending many, many $ remediating a building. And getting those weird questions like, "Inventory says we have 500ml of X, anyone know where it is?"
- logifail 5y ago
  > This is how you wind up spending many, many $ remediating a building Oh yes, and this isn't a new phenomenon, for instance: "When Cambridge's physicists moved out of the famous Cavendish laboratories in the mid-1970s, they unintentionally left behind a dangerous legacy: a building thoroughly contaminated with mercury. Concern about rising levels of mercury vapour in the air in recent months led university officials to take urine samples from 43 of the social scientists who now have offices in the old Cavendish. The results, announced last week, show that some people have exposure levels comparable to people who work with mercury in industry."[0] [0] The mercury the physicists left behind https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817450-800-the-mercury-the-physicists-left-behind/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817450-800-the-merc...

dekhn 5y ago

No bench chemist should attempt to cleanup this stuff. Go to your university or company EHS, and if you don;'t have that, your city does. The history of chemistry is filled with responsible and intelligent organic chemists who nonetheless died terrible deaths. EHS has strategies to avoid this.

throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Humor us all and think another few steps ahead. And what's EHS gonna do? They're gonna CC the guy who's office is right beside yours because (surprise surprise) the departments and teams who's work results in them having weird nasty stuff buried in the back of the walk in fridge are the same people who know how to handle it. EHS is just a coordinator. They don't have subject matter in everything. So they contact the experts. If your biology department fridge with Space AIDS(TM) in it it's because your department is the experts so you'll be getting the call.
- dekhn 5y ago
  Yes, I know how these things work, as my coworkers were those EHS people. The point is that they had training, and they are working within an official university context (laws, etc).
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    So why not save everyone the week of back and fourth emails while nothing gets done and ask them directly how they want to deal with it rather than putting tons of people on blast and substantially constraining their options by bringing intra-organization politics into the mix?
    - QuercusMax 5y ago
      Sounds like a great way to get Normalization of Deviance[1]. One senior person says "I know how to dispose of this, so it's OK if I don't go through proper channels." Then the next person, following their lead without understanding the implications, says "Joe Senior over there disposed of something scary they found without wasting time going through EHS, so I'll do the same." Maybe it goes fine for a while, but eventually you'll end up with a situation where you've poisoned the groundwater or released dangerous chemicals into the air, because nobody is following the proper channels any more. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
      - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
        Telling your boss or relevant colleague instead of going over everyone's heads from the get go isn't normalization of deviance and we both know it. I really dislike these sorts of "name drop" comments. They're just equivalent of "F" or "the front fell off" with a high enough brow for HN veneer on top.
        QuercusMax 5y ago
        You're suggesting that people bypass official procedures and/or laws in order to save time. This is a bad path to start down. The fact that you're posting this as a throwaway indicates that you don't want your HN account associated with these proposals. Here's a relevant software-related analogy: I work in a situation where if we receive certain types of data, we have to go through proper procedures (including an official incident response team). It would be very easy for me to say "I've verified that nobody accessed this data, and we can just delete it," instead of going through the proper channels, which are VERY annoying and require a bunch of paperwork, possibly meetings, etc. Maybe nothing bad happens. But next time this happens, one of my junior colleagues remembers that the 'correct' thing to do was what I did (clean it up myself after verifying nobody accessed the data). Except they screwed up and didn't verify that nobody had accessed the data in question - and now we are in legal hot water over a data privacy breach. And then people go back through the records, and both the junior engineer and I get fired for bypassing the procedures which we've been trained on, all because I wanted to save some time.

mcguire 5y ago

This is how you wind up spending many, many $ remediating a building. And getting those weird questions like, "Inventory says we have 500ml of X, anyone know where it is?"

logifail 5y ago
> This is how you wind up spending many, many $ remediating a building Oh yes, and this isn't a new phenomenon, for instance: "When Cambridge's physicists moved out of the famous Cavendish laboratories in the mid-1970s, they unintentionally left behind a dangerous legacy: a building thoroughly contaminated with mercury. Concern about rising levels of mercury vapour in the air in recent months led university officials to take urine samples from 43 of the social scientists who now have offices in the old Cavendish. The results, announced last week, show that some people have exposure levels comparable to people who work with mercury in industry."[0] [0] The mercury the physicists left behind https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817450-800-the-mercury-the-physicists-left-behind/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12817450-800-the-merc...