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If you walk quietly through the fourth floor of Crawford late at night
when no one else is around, listen carefully.
You just might hear them giggling . . .

This astounding picture was taken by Anne-Marie Eriksson. The (unusually) careless
lab fairy's image was caught by Anne-Marie's experiment's photo capture device.



Lab Fairies. Demonic little pests that get great enjoyment out of messing with some poor undergraduate's lab project.

Their favorite activities include doing things like "bumping" a sensitive dial, switching a sample of Cobalt-60 with something like Cesium-137, or opening a data file on the computer and multiplying each number they find by 3.14159.
Evil little things that break the poor undergrad's head when they go into lab the next day and try to figure out why the beautiful sine wave they were getting the previous time is now nothing but random sharp peaks and flat lines.

Unfortunately, very few know about these nuisances, and even fewer have the guts to include them as a "source of error" in their lab reports. Steps must be taken to remove these fairies from our university, and these actions must be taken now! (In other words, before I have to take Senior Lab 2.) An anonymous source has told me that open containers of kerosene help to keep them away. Oh, and also Pokemon toys, Furbies, and Tickle-Me-Elmos. At the next SPS meeting, we will be taking up a collection to buy one or more of these Fairy Aversion Devices, or FADs. Please contribute! It's even tax-deductible!

But if any of you astronomer night owls ever happen to hear a lab fairy laughing at the prospect of another undergraduate's F, please remember one thing: it is not wise to go over and try to smack one on your own, no matter how appealing that concept may be. For as soon as you touch a fairy, you'll have to deal with their protectors and caretakers: the mannequins. But that's another story . . .

*


UPDATE: My lab partner has discovered a new FAD! It turns out that charms shaped like fairies will also ward off lab fairies, if the charm is properly prepared. To prepare a charm, place it on a broken prism or on a piece of quartz from Arkansas and turn on a mercury (Hg) lamp next to it for three hours. Once that is done, the charm is properly enchanted for six months plus/minus sigma t based on the luminosity of your lamp. After that, just remember:
"All you have to do is hang this charm around your neck
And your experiments the lab fairies won't wreck."
Thanks Beth!

Report any Fairy Disturbances to kzajdel@fit.edu