John A. Hern Jr wrote:
> Some years ago a friend who worked in the hospital gave me some grain alcohol; I had it in the shop for cleaning stuff.
Someting like 25 years ago, I worked in the aerospace industry. We were delivering a piece of hardware we had built to a large company in Kent, Washington. After working several days without much sleep to meet the delivery deadline and a cross country flight with the instrument we arrived in a Seattle motel, at about 10 pm. My buddy went to bed and I was supposed to give the instrument a wipe-down with the alcohol to make sure it was clean for delivery the next day. The alcohol we had was 200 proof "absolute" ethanol from the lab supply and I soaked a bunch of Kimwipes in it and cleaned the instrument by wiping it all over. When done with a
wipe, I tosses them into the trasah basket. Thye room's windows were closed
Pretty soon, I felt really sleepy and lay down on the bed. In an hour or two, I awoke feeling very nauseous and started to the toilet maybe 8 feet away, but didn't even malke it 1/2 way. I was hung over for days. Moral: Be careful with alcohol fumes.
We delivered the instrument and moved our equipment to the aerospace company's assembly area. In addition to our tools and test gear, we had a few more bottles of the alcohol for cleaning the optics, and left an open one on the bench. Our work area was on the way to the Coke machine, and every day, the level in the bottle went down some. It seems the night shift had a taste for our alcohol. In fact, the real absolute alcohol had fewer impurities in it than Vodka.
LoL, in retrospect.
BTW, Isopropyl alcohol (Rubbing Alcohol) from the drug store has water in it. It is another alcohol, not ethyl or methyl. There are actually hundreds if not thousands of chemically different alcohols. I just mentioned the relevant ones.
John
> I gotta hand it to her, she never questioned my drinking the stuff, though.
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