Knobhead wins…..Fatality!
Back in 1993 when I was at secondary school and in the last class of the day (Chemistry) waiting for it to end a classmate of mine submitted his Darwin attempt for the year- True he probably couldn’t have died from it but for a few seconds I did think he was in trouble. A bit of background our school had a very lax approach to guarding the chemical cupboard and a number of times students would pop back from the cupboard with various flammable substances to play with during the lesson.

The lesson in particular we were doing a practical involving separating salt from saltwater using a Bunsen burner when Wayne returned to our group with a petri dish of magnesium powder. We spent most of the lesson throwing the powder into the flame of the Bunsen burner until Wayne hit upon a better idea. He filled his palm with the powder that was left and brought it up to his mouth, before we could ask what the hell he was doing he grabbed the Bunsen burner and yelled “Watch this lads I’m Sonya “Blaze . For anyone who doesn’t know who she is, Sonya is a character from the game Mortal Kombat, a game that we had been playing on at the local arcade quite recently, and our moronic friend Wayne was about to attempt her finishing move by blowing the powder through the flame and creating a fireball type effect that would have looked pretty cool (And if I’m being really pedantic not really like the move she did in the game at all).

The problem was instead of leaving Bunsen burner at the end of his hand, Wayne placed the burner directly over the powder and set fire to it in the palm of his hand. What happened next only took a few seconds but to everyone else watching the incident it seemed to happen in slow motion.

In a state of panic Wayne threw both the now burning powder and the Bunsen burner out of his hand hot potato style in the air , straight into his own face. The burning powder and the Bunsen burner managed to melt part of his safety goggles and set fire to part of his hair as well. Wayne let out a high pitched shriek that could be heard two classrooms away and dived under the nearest table while smacking himself on the head to put out the flames. The incident was then passed round school and Wayne couldn’t go nowhere for a while without people taking the piss.

I also had to ait a bit longer for that day to end as our group was also held back in detention to write up and essay about safety in science classes.
(mon bison powered by magnets, Fri 13 Feb 2009, 11:43, Reply)