When I first saw this,

my first thought was that the student, who shall remain unnamed to protect the innocent (initials JCK), did not do a very good job of cleaning the NMR tubes. I thought he left a big red chunk of stuff on the inside of the NMR tubes. Turns out it was just the caps placed on the bottom of the tubes, all clean and ready to go.

My humble apologies JCK.

What is more satisfying, ice cream on a hot Iowa summer day or having clean NMR tubes at the ready after a long prep TLC separation?

I once had a “friend” who would “borrow” other people’s clean NMR tubes and fritted funnels while he was in graduate school. Clean tubes and clean frits are like hen’s teeth in the chemistry lab.