Hey Imagine my surprise yesterday morning when I walked into my department to find a large section of the back end of it taped up with red and white "Attention! Bad stuff happened here!" tape. Puzzlement turned to consternation when I saw that the scintillation counter, worth a cool quarter of a million, was stuck behind said tape. I need to do a mammoth amount of work involving said scintillation counter this week. For those interested, a scintillation counter is used to detect and quantify radioactivity in samples, a useful biological tool. Unlike a geiger counter, which merely detects radioactivity so you can make a judgment call to get the fuck out of there if necessary, this thing can count anything from minute amounts to right off the scale - hence the name - and you can use the data to find out all sorts of cool stuff about stuff. And here it was, hemmed in like a caged animal, behind this red and white tape. What could it possibly have done? A good question - it is fairly sedentary, with lots of belt-driven trays and racks beneath its hood and a monitor perched on a stand like an antenna-bearing eye leering over the top in its DOS-based simplicity. Also a keyboard, cunningly hidden in it which the enlightened can pull out on a slidy-tray thing, to make it go and, of course, stop. It's a very cool machine. It was at approximately this time that I began to see the big picture. In this case, a large steel pole, approximately 6 foot long and about as thick as my arm, weighing about 50 pounds, lying on the floor alongside the counter. Above it, a gi-normous hole in the ceiling, clearly having been rent by something large punching through it from above. Exhibit C: a fairly nasty chunk bitten out of the floor, approximately the diameter of my arm across. Flanking the cool beta counter, an ice machine, two large freezers and the extra Ladies' bathroom, as normal. It is, you can probably guess, a fairly busy region of the department, what with the sample-storage in the freezers, the ice machine, the beta counter and the toilet right there. Fortunately nobody was actually standing there when the clowns working in the roof decided to let go of a 6', 50lb chunk of cast iron and let it plummet through our roof and take a divot out of our floor, because they would have been decaptitated. Who said science is for nerds? It's a contact sport! Needless to say, as soon as we heard the workmen in the roof above my communal office, everyone found excuses to move to another room. Having the sky fall on our heads once a day is quite enough, we felt. -d-