• Question: Have you ever had any funny experiences during work or when you were studying?

    Asked by marinebio1213 to Ed, Hayley, Jason, Nathan, Sophie on 14 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Hayley Evers-King

      Hayley Evers-King answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Hundreds! I once had my washing stolen by monkeys when I was on field work in Malaysia. I got totally lost in Lisbon when going to a meeting. I had to do some crazy Scottish dancing at a conference in Glasgow. I once hid one of my colleagues mosquito repellent after he told me off for hating mosquitos! I got up in front of a whole audience of people and asked David Attenborough a silly question (there was a lot of laughing, but I was pleased!)

    • Photo: Sophie Holles

      Sophie Holles answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Yes lots as well! It helps that I’ve been lucky to work with friends and fun people. Once while working with a Swiss girl called Irene we were doing a fish experiment at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells. We were late leaving and they locked the gate so we were trapped inside! We had to climb around a wall and wade through a moat to escape and our supervisors took the mickey out of us for ages calling us ninjas.

      I’ve also had to do the Scottish dancing (Céilidh) at a conference, and once I went out for dinner with a guest lecturer and stayed up so late that I nearly missed my flight to Germany and had to get a taxi all the way from Bristol to Heathrow (which is funny now but wasn’t at the time!). Once a friend I was working with found a picture of police confiscating sound equipment from people that had been having parties in a local magazine from French Polynesia where we were working, she changed words in the article to put my name in it and sent it to my supervisors as a prank that my scientific sound equipment had been confiscated! The funny thing was that later that week the police came to our research station to invite us to a party and they recreated the picture as a joke!

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