Chemists and microbiologists are worried about obscure little things you and I haven’t even heads of. But, oh boy are those things nasty. You know, nightmare stuff like acid that slips through your skin and eats your bones or breathing a single spore that is enough to kill you. Such delightful people to have lunch with.

Funny tangential story here.

I used to design electronics. One product is a black box with just a couple of LED lights on the front and an LED display. It also gets inserted into a special socket, from which it gets it's power. So no power cord and it can only be powered on if we have the much larger thing it gets plugged into. Of course, I needed to power it on to demonstrate it to customers, so I took apart one of the sockets that it goes into, and ran a power cord off of it so I could plug it into the wall (it runs off of ~120 VAC).

I figured to make my life easier, so I didn't have to constantly plug and unplug it, I would put a switch on it. So I just glued a red switch on the side and wired it all up.

Then I went through airport security with it. Ended up being pulled aside for about an hour as they questioned me about it and scanned the thing damn near 20 times. It was like every TSA agent in the area was watching the scans as it went through. I was talking to the head TSA guy who said "Man, I know you're fine. However, this is precisely one of the things we are told to look out for: homemade devices with switches on them. Did you have to make it red?" lol

He eventually got some higher up on the phone and it was clear from the one-side of the conversation I heard that the higher up was like "if you think the guy is fine, let him through" and so I was let through. Barely made my flight tho. Glad we got there really early.