You might know that I majored in Chemistry in college and that a man named Mr. Pechonick was one of my favorite instructors. I have talked about him in a previous post. During my sophomore year, I had him for another class. During one of the labs, we did an experiment where we melted moth balls and measured the temperature as they returned to a solid state. Moth balls are made of a compound called Naphthalene. During this lab, we all worked on our own, but we ended up talking to each other throughout the class trying to figure out what to do where Mr. Pechonick might not have given us very much guidance.
At the end of the experiment, each of us ended up with a test tube full of Naphthalene and we were not clear on exactly what we needed to do to get it out. I was working ahead of some of the others and had come up with a solution of heating the test tube back up, pouring the Naphthalene on paper towels and throwing those away. I was wrapping up with this solution as people started talking.
“What do we do with the Naphthalene?”
“We can’t pour it down the sink! It will stop it up.”
“Hey Robert Johnson just poured Naphthalene down the sink!”
“He’s going to be in trouble!”
“Pechonick is going to kill him!”
I don’t think Mr. Pechonick overheard our conversation but just knew it was about time for us to be wrapping up our experiments and he came out of his office to oversee us wrapping up. When he came out, he stops next to Robert Johnson and says, “Now, I don’t want anyone pouring any Naphthalene down the sink. Johnson! You didn’t pour any Naphthalene down the sink did you?”
Johnson replied, “A little.”
There was a guy in our class whose name I cannot remember that was a commuter and a little older than everyone else. He was not a class clown but he reminded everyone of Bill Murray a little bit in the way he looked and a lot in the way that he carried himself. He was standing in the back of the lab and asked in a very knowing way, “What will happen if we pour Naphthalene down the sink, Mr. Pechonick?” Mr. Pechonick replied, “It will stop it up!”
To the best of my knowledge, the sink never stopped up and Robert Johnson passed the class like the rest of us.