The Devil is in the Details

The Devil truly is in the details. Sadly, the light we were getting from our experiment was faint and lasted only a second or two. Therefore, my advisor sat down and went through every little detail of what we were doing and of course WHY we were doing it. It turns out that I had ordered a slightly different version of the chemical rather than having a BF₄^- ion attached to it I had ordered the analog that had the Cl^- ion attached to it. Well in all honesty they should have been essentially the same because, I thought, we were only working with the positive very large organometallic ion. Well you see Cl^- ions like water, in fact they really really like water. In fact they like water so much that it was essentially pulling it out of the air. BF₄^- ions on the other hand really don’t like water. The thing that turns our light off in the end is once the organometallic ion becomes surrounded by water. Silly rabbit chemicals are not all the same.

Anyway I did feel good later that night when I was converting the bad chemical into the good chemical. My advisor came in and started grilling me on the metathesis reaction I was doing. Why I was doing each step no matter how small. I was starting to feel as though he just didn’t trust me to do this simple synthesis when all of a sudden he said “Well good it sounds like you know what you are doing.” I was amazed and overjoyed. I had received high praise at the graduate level.