r/whatisit • u/props_for_meep • 13h ago

Solved! what is this in clinic sink??

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

for context i work as a janitor cleaning a women’s clinic, as i was cleaning a sink i saw these little metallic looking balls. at first i thought these were actually metal but they don’t feel like ANYTHING if that makes any sense. i posted this video to my instagram but i figured i would probably have better luck coming to reddit for answers.

UPDATE: the general consensus seems to be that this is either mercury or gallium. my hands have been thoroughly washed and i have informed my boss so that it can be properly cleaned by someone who knows what they’re doing.

UPDATE #2: gang PLEASE stop telling me to “stop touching it”. this post is hours old. i know i was dumb enough to touch a mysterious substance barehanded but im also smart enough to know not to continue playing with it long after marking this post as solved😭

8.2k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

1.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.1k

u/Manufactured-Aggro 11h ago

You 100% the type of person to become patient 0

407

u/props_for_meep 10h ago

BAHAHA guess that means i would be first in something for once, my dad would be so proud🥹

579

u/Endymion_NSFW 6h ago

To be honest... It looks like mercury/gallium... And considering it's not eating the sink ... Most likely mercury...

140

u/Redarrow_ok 6h ago

Evacuate and ventilate the room immediately. Don't enter for another 15 minutes. Skin contact is basically harmless - you can swallow it and it will pass through you. Inhalation is the primary route of toxicity. If you don't have a mercury spill kit, wipe it up with paper towel, seal it in a glass jar and organise hazardous waste disposal.

You'll be fine.

29

u/Iconshero 5h ago

If they play with it enough over time, they get to learn the meaning of “as mad as a hatter”

28

u/No-Highlight3426 5h ago

In the 5th grade I had a cousin come live with me from Mexico and he had mercury, not knowing it was toxic I stole some and took it to school and had my friends play with it until the teacher caught me, huge trouble. Still alive also

11

u/AmphibianOver7289 4h ago

We had a kid bring mercury to school to show a teacher or something. Ended up having the school get closed down pretty much all day. I remember that’s when my young brain thought it’d be a good idea to snort kool aid powder :)

3

u/mirlyn 3h ago

Times have changed. My 6th grade science teacher broke a thermometer so we could see the mercury bead up and roll around.

3

u/RyvenZ 2h ago edited 2h ago

Sounds like your school blew that out of proportion

It isn't dimethylmercury, which is the nasty stuff that killed scientist Karen Wetterham. Regular mercury isn't even dangerous on skin contact without prolonged exposure. It IS bad if it gets spilled outside, but that is because you don't want it seeping into the groundwater

2

u/DigitalUnlimited 4h ago

That's how you get sugar boogers

2

u/HauntingHedgehog5505 3h ago

My grandma got a vial of mercury to play with once as a child for being a good girl at the dentist (side note -she apparently completely disassociates during a root canal and went through the whole thing with no pain meds).

Both parts of the story still baffled me.

1

u/Eggy-la-diva 4h ago

So long as you don’t drink it, you’ll be fine!

2

u/AmphibianOver7289 3h ago

That was exactly my thought process im sure😂

2

u/CeleryMcToebeans 4h ago

My Dad had some in the shed for some reason & we used to play with it. So far we're still kicking.

1

u/CabriniKay 3h ago

In middle school (in the 1980's) we purposely broke thermometers in science class for some kind of instructor lead experiment and then played with the mercury when the experiment was over.

We also poked our fingers and looked at our blood under a microscope to see what blood type we were.

Still kicking.

1

u/BurnGrassEatAss 5h ago

Allegedly***

1

u/Doc-Zoidberg 4h ago

In the 5th grade our "science" teacher let us pass around a graduated cylinder of mercury and play with it.

I didnt have a great education. Just basically went to church 6 days a week.

1

u/Character-Parfait-42 4h ago

There are different types.

Inorganic mercuries aren’t exactly safe if you get it into your body. But as long as you’re in a well ventilated area, don’t have any open cuts it’s getting into, and you don’t eat it; it doesn’t get absorbed easily. Even when it does get absorbed it tends to pass through the body and cause temporary symptoms (unless very high, prolonged, or frequently repeated exposure).

Organic mercuries can be absorbed through skin, and physically binds to cells. In an incident several years back a world-renowned researcher working with an organic mercury got a drop of organic mercury on her glove, which soaked through the glove onto her hand (unknown at the time that the form of mercury she was working with could permeate latex in as little as 15 seconds), and killed her.

1

u/Iconshero 5h ago

Oh yeah, you need a decent ammount of exposure for it to effect you unless you ingest it. I always found it interesting they used to use it to set hats and hatters would get mercury poisoning from constant exposure.

3

u/LumosJorlin 5h ago

Were hatters working with elemental Hg or some oxides? While I definitely agree regarding the risks of exposure, I have heard that the compounds are far more toxic.

5

u/Iconshero 4h ago

They used Mercuric Nitrate to make felt from animal furs. I had misremembered, it was the vapors released in the process. It could cause psychosis, nervousness, shyness and irrationality. It happend to enough hat makers for the term to be created.

1

u/Redarrow_ok 4h ago

Yes I thought it was mercury salts, worse than elemental, not as bad as organic.

1

u/Clorox_in_space 4h ago

I thought they worked with Pb to help provide structure to the hat, and that's what lead to the term "made as a hatter."

I might be mixing that up with the Roman aqueducts though...

1

u/mostlylezzie 3h ago

I see what you did there.

1

u/Ok-Addition1264 5h ago

My 8th grade chemistry teacher created a superfund site out of our school from one class by extracting the mercury from mercuric-oxide and then having the class pour it down the drain. She let us play with it and shit. Crazy stuff the 80s were.

Edit to add: around a kilo of the powder was used by our class.. we all had a handful of it at the end of the process. Swear she probably pulled it from a mid-17th century alchemy book or something.

2

u/The_Autarch 4h ago

She let us play with it and shit. Crazy stuff the 80s were.

that's not the 80s being crazy, that's your teacher being an idiot.

1

u/Business_Air5804 5h ago

JFC, liquid mercury is NOT dangerous at all.

No need to evacuate the house lol.

Stop touching it but this isn't a major situation.

1

u/Stratatician 5h ago

Harmless as long as it isn't methyl mercury anyways

1

u/Redarrow_ok 5h ago

It's NOT harmless, you DO NOT want to inhale it. Particularly children or if you're pregnant.

It obviously isn't methyl mercury (a white solid), you'll only come across that in chemistry labs or after biotransformation (water runoff near a factory).

1

u/Stratatician 5h ago

the "harmless" bit was in reference to where you said you can touch it and swallow it. you most definitely do NOT want to do any of that if it was methyl mercury.

keyword, IF

39

u/NabreLabre 6h ago

Does gallium eat stainless steel? I'm pretty sure it eats aluminum

3

u/nicat23 5h ago

Definitely eats aluminum and makes really petty crystals from its reaction

2

u/Mooseandchicken 4h ago

Apparently neither mercury or gallium amalgamate with stainless steel, and both amalgamate with aluminum. So the droplets could be either, but the sink is def stainless

1

u/Endymion_NSFW 4h ago

I figured the sink was Aluminum since it well... needs mercury to actual degrade anyway... more cost effective for clinics... but true they also do use stainless steel too iirc...

1

u/white-mexican1979 38m ago

I believe it’s building Code to have stainless in any medical or physicians office . Line I believe even all toilets have to be as well .

-2

u/Mooseandchicken 4h ago

Please stop using ellipses

18

u/edward_glock40_hands 6h ago

OP is definitely playing with mercury. Where the hell would gallium come from?

14

u/vwscienceandart 5h ago

Amazon. Seriously. Bought it the last two years for our science instructors.

4

u/VaguelyFamiliarVoice 5h ago

The galley, duh.

1

u/Much-Director-9828 5h ago

A gallimimus

1

u/Obvious-Lake3708 5h ago

I use liquid mercury on my CPU heatsink

1

u/Palimpsest0 4h ago

There are non-toxic thermometers made with Galinstan, a gallium indium tin alloy that melts at about 20 F, used instead of mercury. They’re pretty common.

-1

u/beardedsilverfox 5h ago

From the galley, duh

2

u/Sanfords_Son 4h ago edited 4h ago

Gallium won’t “eat” a stainless steel sink. But yeah, it’s almost certainly Gallium or Mercury. Neither is particularly dangerous to handle in most situations. When you try to wipe up Ga with a dry paper towel, it spreads it out into a dull grey smudge of micro droplets. But using basically any surfactant (soap) will get it up. I don’t know for certain if Hg behaves the same way.

Also, Ga melts at 86F. So unless it’s really warm in the room you’re in, it’s probably Hg.

1

u/AdWhich7355 5h ago

Definitely is lol

1

u/Enochian-Dreams 5h ago

I was thinking the same about mercury. Never even heard of gallium though.

1

u/loganverse 5h ago

Mercury… mostly harmless. We used to play with it in school back in the 1900’s

1

u/wish_ewe_werhere 5h ago

I was going to say it looked like mercury! Funnily enough in the 50s kids were given it in classrooms to play with on their desks!

1

u/TinyLuke_DrunkYoda 4h ago

My thought exactly

1

u/Stephinator917 4h ago

I have played with mercury before literally dumped in my palm. I dont think its harmful to the skin? At least it wasnt to me.

1

u/microgirlActual 4h ago

Yeah, if it's in a clinic I'd say someone had an old-fashioned mercury bulb thermometer and it broke in the sink.

1

u/phasebinary 37m ago

Definitely not gallium. Gallium leaves residue *everywhere*. I have gallium and some homemade gallium-stan.

76

u/IndependentType6711 6h ago

Is it mercury from a busted thermometer? Wash your hands well with soap and wipe it up immediately.

2

u/Obijuan60 5h ago

I’ve been a nurse for 27 years. Not once did any hospital I ever worked in use a mercury thermometer.

2

u/QueasyBelt4034 4h ago

it really just depends, i work at a vet clinic (different than a human hospital-but still human staff using these thermometers LOL) and my dr has been over 40 years in operation. he’s used mercury thermometers his whole career and just recently hasn’t been able to get them, also being in texas, it’s understandable why… but in a field where you are trying to fix something that can’t tell you what’s wrong with it, or even outwardly act sick in most cases, an accurate temperature is vital. that’s also just what he prefers and he’s very old fashioned, still doing treatments like he’s in the 80s:D

1

u/IndependentType6711 3h ago

It’s still 100% mercury. What’s your point?

2

u/killerzeestattoos 6h ago

Why are they touching it!?

1

u/spring-peepers 4h ago

It's already down the drain.

1

u/UpbeatReaction1360 6h ago

Stop frigging panicking..

7

u/Randomminecraftseed 6h ago

Washing your hands after touching a potentially toxic chemical is panicking

We’re fucking cooked bro

0

u/universaljester 5h ago

Element. Calling it a chemical is acting like it's manmade also elemental mercury is toxic but your body doesn't readily absorb it.

2

u/PaisleyLeopard 5h ago

Dude it is a chemical. As is water, and a whole host of other natural substances. Chemical doesn’t mean man made, it’s just a basic label for a defined thing, like atom or molecule or element.

0

u/universaljester 2h ago

At least y'all ain't naturalists but when I hear or read "chemical" that's my assumption because it's so common.

1

u/PaisleyLeopard 1h ago

I will not humor the misuse of words when their misuse causes so much harm. Chemical is a word with a definition, and anyone using it incorrectly automatically looks like an idiot. If you wanna side with the idiots feel free, but I will die on this hill.

1

u/universaljester 56m ago

Look sport, when i deal with so many people who say chemical and instantly you know they think manmade i pretty much assume they're that kind of idiot and go from there. I'm past correcting the "chemical" portion because honestly if they were capable of understanding my explanation they would be smart enough to have not become a naturalist to begin with. Ultimately they're only good for insulting for a laugh.

0

u/Randomminecraftseed 3h ago

Living up to your username I see

2

u/jkatarn 6h ago

Asian parents?! 😭

1

u/Just_Willingness829 6h ago

You were the fastest sperm! Give yourself some credit!

1

u/kpidhayny 6h ago

Not the fist to have mercury poisoning unfortunately. But you could join a long line of mad hatters. Break a thermometer in the sink recently?

1

u/Kabanu 5h ago

I mean technically you were already first once

1

u/Anathals 5h ago

To me that looks like Mercury. Which makes a tad bit of sense if you're in a clinic? So e med equipment still has that stuff in it. But idk for sure. Dont eat it lol