It was my first science experiment of this year and I can’t explain how excited I am. I was organized and ready. My Erlenmeyer flasks were organized off to one side and my Florence flasks were organized off to the other. My beaker tongs were placed beside me on my desk, my eye dropper right next to it, and I already had my safety goggles off to the side. I waited for my teacher to finish talking just so I could start. It started to feel as if we already went over the same rules over and over, we already went over the experiment yesterday. “when will he just stop talking?” I asked myself. Our teacher Ms. Brenda talked way too much. It felt as if no one liked her. A million thoughts went through my head while just waiting. I already knew what to do, same with y partner that I was supposed to do the experiment with. We both just talked and ignored the fact that she was talking, we were done waiting. So, we decided to just start off on our own while she was still talking. We were in the back anyway; we didn’t think she could see us because of all the people that were sitting in front of us, so we thought…

We first started off by mixing some weird blue liquid with a green one, to be honest, I didn’t know what I was mixing. The teacher told us that it was supposed to fizz up, but it didn’t. We didn’t know what we were doing wrong and it frustrated us. We sat there thinking, “what should we do now?” because we weren’t listening to the instructions. We missed out on everything, so we had to figure everything out ourselves. We didn’t ask because we thought we would get in trouble for not listening. So, we decided to mix a bunch of random things that were spread across our desk. There were many types of materials around us, some that were flammable, some that were harmful, some that could explode, some that were infectious, and some that were a real hazard to our health. The symbols showed that they were dangerously poisonous and flammable, but we ignored that fact. We started to mix a bunch of things into our graduated cylinders.

Suddenly, our eyes started to go red and burn. We realized we forgot to put off our safety goggles. We were scared and our shrieks of scaredness had broken the silence and the teacher had stopped talking. He realized what we had done and so did we. We couldn’t see and all we could think of was or regrets of deciding to go ahead with the lab. Our teacher ended up guiding us to the eyewash station to get all the fumes from the mixture out of our eyes. We both stood there and washed our eyes until the burning stopped, and we ended up getting checked out by the first aid attendant. After the whole experience, we realized our mistake. but our punishment was two weeks worth of detention and from now on, we had to sit in front of the teacher so we wouldn’t fool off ever again.

WHMIS hazard symbols:

This symbol means that the material can cause fires. The product is self-heating, flammable. It indicates that the product can produce flammable gases when it comes in contact with other substances.

This symbol means that the toxins in this material can cause death after coming in contact with small amounts of the product. You can see this symbol on cleaning products.

Hazardous Household Product Symbols

This tells you to be aware of the product because its toxins can cause sickness. It’s extremely unhealthy to breathe in the fumes of the product. Be sure to wear masks/gloves when in contact.

This tells you to handle the product with care because it can cause an explosion. It’s dangerous to mix explosive products with other products.