Extra Lab Activities

[jerkwad]

I'm a teaching assistant for a college physics lab, and today I had a bit of interesting experience that I thought I'd share. I had a couple students that needed to finish the last project, but as I had my own homework to do, I couldn't stay in the room with them. So, I let them in, and went back to my office.

Now, the experiment they were conducting required the room to be completely dark, so all of the lights were off and the window on the door was blocked off. About an hour after I had left them, one of the other TAs went into the lab to get some things. Not realizing that anyone was in there he turned on the lights, and saw the two of them quickly jump apart and return to their equipment. Having realized that he might have interrupted something, he came back to the office and told the person in charge of the lab. I was sitting right next to them as this conversation transpired, and since they were my students, I said I would go and check to make sure everything was kosher.

As I was preparing to enter the room, I made sure to make an excessive amount of noise, so as to announce my presence. As much as I might have found it hilarious to intrude on such activities, I felt it was in everyone's best interest to make sure that I didn't explicitly witness anything. Anyhow, upon walking in the room, they nonchalantly declare that they're finished, and so I turn on the lights. As I walk to the back of the room, I notice he is still fairly hard (he was wearing sweatpants), but say nothing. As I'm checking over the equipment and their results to make sure everything is okay, he makes the comment "You have something on your chin" to his partner. She quickly rubbed her hand across the bottom of her face and giggled, but made no other response. I don't know if anything actually happened, but given the amount of flirting these two do in class on a normal basis, it wouldn't surprise me.

Hopefully the story was somewhat entertaining for some. I got a good laugh out of the situation, and figured I'd pass it on to you all.

[patrourke]

Ahh, that brought back some great memories for me. Back when I was studying Physics, I was lucky to be paired up with the only girl in our third-year class for labs one semester. She was tall (about 5'10"), very smart and very very European (Belgian exchange student) - oddly fashionable, exotic (to an Australian), and as far as I could tell never shaved anywhere.

Anyway, as part of physics 20 years ago we had to spend plenty of time exposing photographic film to various beams of elements* and then developing them in the lab darkroom. Well what do two 19-20 year olds do in the dark for a couple of hours every week while we wait for the prints to develop and fix? Once the talking and philosophising runs out, there is plenty of flirting in the dark, then groping, over the bra, under the bra, down the jeans, slipping tongues in and out, listening occasionally if anyone else needed to come in. We never actually went all the way in that darkroom, but we did in a well-lit bedroom later. Sure I could then see all the great curves that I'd only touched before, but it didn't really have the same buzz!

To this day that vinegary smell of acetate and other photographic chemicals gets me going. It probably killed a few brain cells at the time. It probably helped :-)

(* I also find it embarrassing now that I can't really remember what the hell the experiments were about even though I have a PhD in physics; the other darkroom activities were much more interesting!)