Wrong Measures
I’m a chemist and was working on a reaction with a new palladium catalyst that we had just ordered. Since I was a dumb undergrad, I didn’t really make the connection that I didn’t need to put in equal amounts of the catalyst. I weighed out 200 grams of the catalyst and put it in the reaction. I mentioned to my boss later that day that we’d need to order more because I had used up almost all of it already.
It was at that point that he mentioned that it had cost about $15,000 for the 250g bottle and that I should have been using about 3 milligrams and not 200 grams. Not only was it very expensive though, it had taken over a year to come in after they had ordered it. I was very lucky that I didn’t get fired and that we were okay to use the remaining 50 grams for the next few years.