My dad used to work at Tulane University as a geochemistry researcher back when I was a wee lad. He was doing work on rare earth minerals in rivers and streams or something like that. But to me back then, the details weren’t important. What was important that he was a SCIENTIST in a LABCOAT and he got to play around with test tubes and fancy equipment. Which was just really cool, because during the summers when I was out of school, he would take me to his lab and just kinda let me roam the place while he worked.

I remember having a fascination with syringes. Because he had a lot of those in his lab. There were a lot of old discarded ones no longer in use and he let me play with them by the sink or take them home. Whenever I went to the playground and the other kids were having a water gun fight, I would show up instead with large syringes filled with water and squirt at them with those instead.

There were tons of other cool stuff in his lab as well obviously. One time he told me he wanted to show me something. He brought out a big canister of liquid nitrogen and told me to get up onto a high stool. Then he proceeded to dump the entire canister onto the ground. All the nitrogen immediately evaporated but not before sweeping across the entire floor, freezing all the dust bunnies on the ground together. He then told me to get a broom. Apparently this is a pretty quick way to do some light cleaning. I believe this is what you would call a “core memory” in the movie Inside Out. I dunno, but this memory always brings me joy for some reason.

There was a big computer lab near his office. One of his coworker’s daughter was also there during the summer. We didn’t have that much to do so we just ended up playing Club Penguin most of the time. It got messy after we figured out we could get each other banned from the game by typing in vulgar words in the chat. While I had no use for the computers other than playing random games, my dad had to use them for actual work. One time he was running this one program that essentially had his screen frozen for over 10 minutes. He told me that it was running some very large calculations, which was why it was taking so long. That amazed me for some reason. In my head, when I thought of calculations, I thought of simple hand calculators that can tell you what 56*81 equaled in less than a second. So for a computer to take over 10 minutes on a calculation… that must have been some bigass numbers.