Alain Fontaine’s Jabberbox

… or “Why you should pay attention to your chemistry teacher”.

A couple of days ago, a friend and co-worker of mine had a big problem. She mistook classic dish washing soap (the classically green liquid) to be special soap for the dishwasher, and put a pretty hefty dose of this stuff into her dishwasher, to wash the dishes. Hum.

The result looked somewhat like this, and her kitchen was full with foam because the stuff just kept flowing out of the machine :

H E L P  !!!

Then I remembered something that was buried deeply into a part of my brain that I didn’t use for years. Soap and oil , saponification , hmmm YES that should work! You use soap to get rid of your oil stains, then you can also use oil to get rid of too much soap. Or the foam thereof. Yes!

The magic recipe: put 10 to 20 cl of olive oil into the dishwasher full of foam, and have it run a quick-clean cycle.

The oil and soap will nicely bind together, and there we go – no more foam soap monster ! This should also work with any other oil… please avoid motor oil though

Happy dishwashing.

Safe containing €170,000 sent to be scrapped

Workers tasked with scrapping a safe at a steel plant in Hennigsdorf near Berlin couldn’t believe their eyes when euro bills floated towards them. The Berlin Postbank had accidently sent a safe containing 170,000 euros in cash to be scrapped.

via Young Germany: Safe containing €170,000 sent to be scrapped.