Task at hand: Breakdown finals at 1 pm and we got problems.. I arrive at 10 am to find none there! Getting "helpers" by 10:30 was no good, we all mostly lingered around uselessly till the lab assistant came and took 1 list of full chemicals needed for analysis of ANY chemical you can think of, only to let us know that the "poison" of our choice was out of stock..
As only good engineers can, we improvised then and there and Arati made a stunning decision to switch the eliminated chemical with another having, as it turned out, completely different physiological symptoms but then we were the organisers so a simple disclaimer took care of it all.. So far so good right? WRONG!
A trip to CCC to get the corrections done and printouts taken only to discover the lab assistant refusing to give access to all chemicals requested (about 45 of them), things were beginning to look ugly when Arati (Yet again! Bless her..) made another list having a lot less chemicals; I guess a moral victory for LabMan was all he wanted as things went their way again. Time now: 11:30 am, 1.5 hours to go..
We discover absence of chemicals needed for analysis of some chemicals and I get this brainstorm of declaring them as "too dangerous to handle with bare hands" hence eliminating that particular problem. Of course a certain chemical (Nope, not telling which one: LabMan doesnt know too) went "missing" during the event itself but the participants were fully under our control by then to complain -_-
The time is 12:25 pm and no positive test for two chemicals which are in the event! One (Oxalate) was solved by getting a positive result for another test while we had to scrounge literature for getting another test for the cation of the 2nd chemical which as it turned out later, was not required at all as the anion was present only here..
So there was time for a Samosa Chaat from Pande's food stall at Engineer (If you ever happen to be in the vicinity, I will personally treat you at Pande's stall; not the lame drop-up for Engineer but the original one a lil farther off) and the event begins at 1:15 pm..
Funniest thing? I had had a crime scene made up involving a circular chalk background in which was another chald outline of a body. That was it! But the innocent teams spent as much as 15 mins trying to see what's in there and a team actually asked me if the presence of a dead bee (pushed in by mistake by another team) had any significance.. We all knew it was bad on our part to keep them in the dark but what the heck? We were all having a lot of fun seeing them there :D
Finally the process of eliminations began and by the end 1 team stole the show by winning while the rest were still 2 rounds behind! Spot no. 2 was close, and spot no.3 still closer.. In the end all teams acknowledged the results fairly which is more than what I can tell for some certain teams who, after learning they weren't qualified for the finals for the 3rd time from us, went and told on us to the chemistry professor present there: Sour grapes!!
Once the mayhem of breakdown went down, Contraption going on in the inner room took centre stage (or the only stage if you will) and a team actually got as close as 29.88 secs to the set target of 30 secs! For more on the event click here!
I must thank all the participants of these two events and more so the committee members: Saurav, Preet, Arati, Meera, Prasoonna (Hope I got that spelling right), Pravin, Buddesh and Saklini, I remember none else.. I was however dumb enough not to take any pics of these events!!
That was supposed to be Day 2 for me, But sadly the news of the demise of Bijay Sandha (I knew him personally) in a train accident rocked us all as the "Final Year Jinx" continued for the 4th year (or so I know, none really keep count) in succession... Hum Yaad Rakhenge Tumhe, Yaar!
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