"HeyBub" wrote in
m:

Doug Miller wrote:

Dunno about CSI folks, but I've worked in two labs: Research
Clinical Pathology at a major cancer research hospital and the
exploration and production labs at the world's largest facility for
studying the origin and migration of petroleum.

"Taste" is a fairly common diagnostic tool - sometimes, admittedly,
by accident as you mouth-pipette various substances such as urine,
liquefied feces, pus, and so on.

Wow. Almost thirty years later, I still remember getting reamed, as a
second-year chemistry major, by the proctor in the Organic lab for
doing just
that: "NEVER PIPETTE BY MOUTH!! YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT'S IN THERE!"

Oh, bother.

If you didn't know what was "in there," why were you fooling with it?
99% of the time you could simply look at the label on the bottle!

Well,In the electronics lab we would make a box with only a cord and male
plug coming out. Put a label on it "#1 Fuse Blower" and leave it around.
Newbies would read and then plug it in. Of course, inside the box the
wires were just terminated together. People don't always believe labels.

Reminds me of the Cheech & Chong dog **** skit that was something like
one convinced the other to taste the unidentified pile. "Tastes like dog
****!"..."Good thing we didn't step in it."


There's best practices and expedient practices. Most of the time,
"expedient" trumps "best."

I don't know of anything that would kill you if you simply LOOKED at
it, but there are a number of things that are lethal if sniffed. Did
you proctor have a fit when people smelled things?

As a point of historical note, before sophisticated tests, physicians
used to diagnose diabetes by tasting the patient's urine.