One of my co-workers was doing a test involving literally hundreds of paper towels.  She’d throw them out and quickly fill the small garbage bins of which we have about 8 along avoiding the 55 gallon drum on wheels as well.  She continued to fill these small bins until all 8 were full and she started dumping the paper towels in the personal garbage bins of the technicians.  As she approached mine with a hand full of wet paper towels I asked her why she didn’t just use the big drum.  She replied that she didn’t want to fill it if someone else needed it.   It’s a fifty five gallon drum with net capacity of 8 times the smaller cans she’s filling.  She’s said she has a degree in applied mathematics.  I think one of the two words in that degree should be removed.

Periodically we get work requests in the lab that are time consuming, sometimes because combinatronics hits people upside the head.  As children, I think we all learned the “if Sally has 3 shirts and 5 shoes, she has 15 shirt-shoe combinations”.  Well, today I previewed a work order that had 6 materials, with 6 treatments, to put through 4 destructive tests each requiring 10 samples at 3 separate time intervals for a total sample demand of 4320 combinations.  When I asked the requester for the samples, he replied “will 200 be enough?”, reply: “Assuming I can cut them into pieces the size of the portion of your brain that takes care of multiplication, yes”.