You were not alone, either of you, in that thought. Next door neighbours smashed a barometer in their garage and the bother they had to go to clean up the mercury (specialist team from the local authority) was quite something.
It reminds me of a chemistry lab accident when I was at school - we were doing something with stearic acid that involved heating it to somewhat more than 100 degrees (I don't recall what as I didn't go on to a career in science, sadly). By then, school labs had stopped using mercury thermometers for most stuff, switching to red dyed alcohol thermometers. But they didn't go high enough for this. Teacher comes over to my fume cupboard. "That's not going very quicky," he says, and takes hold of what he assumes is the glass stirring rod and whisks the mixture vigorously. It was, in fact, the thermometer. Mercury everywhere. Clouds of brown smoke (no idea what that was, sorry). Slams fume cupboard door shut. "Everybody out. NOW!" It was a week before the lab was in use again. Come to think of it, maybe I should have posted this on the facepalm thread.
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