“I’m just happy that I can leave this place knowing that the football field was 314.8 graduated cylinders long,” said Marlon.
Photo by: Jessica Ma
Last week, graduating senior Hank Marlon had a huge discovery when he was about to enter his last laboratory class, BIMM 121. He came forward in a press conference to share his newly found knowledge with reporters.
“You see,” Marlon started explaining, “Apparently, when you use a graduated cylinder to measure volume, rather than estimating, it is much easier to get the amount you wanted than just eyeballing it.”
Marlon seemed completely flabbergasted, according to his friends, and this discovery had changed the way he approached life.
“All my life, my lab TAs have bugged me about using graduated cylinders. ‘Hank, you can’t just eyeball five milliliters.’ ‘Hank don’t just use your graduated cylinder as waste disposal.’ I personally thought their job description was just to be dicks to people when they were doing things the easy way.”
According to Marlon’s roommate Peter Cranston, this is starting to become
a problem.
“Hank used to be a really laid back person, but after his concurrence with this new measuring tool, he has just been anal about it,” said Cranston. “I can’t fry eggs in my own house without him notifying me that I’m using three milliliters of oil more than the optimum amount when I just eyeball how much it will take for me to cook the eggs without them sticking to the pan.”
Hank has measured the majority of known substances. He claims that he will be able to measure how impressed people were at this newfound obsession.
“No one really cares, but he insists on being called the modern era Archimedes,” Cranston said.
Marlon’s mother Grace remarked that she has become increasingly exasperated by her son’s volume measuring agenda.
“It is great that my Hank has discovered that sometimes putting effort into your activities pays dividends,” she said, “but I wish he could apply it to some other activity — hopefully one more useful than this god-awful volume measuring. I am worried this might develop into a compulsion. I think that he will try to measure our cats when he gets home, and I am sure they won’t be enthusiastic by it.”
As a graduating student, Marlon was relieved to have found a new life direction. After choosing his microbiology class at random, he gradually discovered the merits of accurate measuring.
“I would never have guessed that I would find one of my life’s biggest and profound passions on such a random choice,” Marlon confided. “Apparently, knowing how to properly measure volume is also a pretty good skill to have if you are studying microbes! My goal is to spread this knowledge around the world. Nobody should live in the equivalent of the Stone Age like I have for so many years.”
Marlon’s friends left him a goodbye postcard with a pipet drawn on it to wish him good luck in future endeavors. The message said, “May your instruments be always appropriately calibrated!” Since then, Marlon has been in a coma; his parents stated that he couldn’t bear the realization that he has been trying to measure volume with a balance all this time.
