Up and Over

A few days later, I was sitting in class when I noticed something about the ceiling. It was one of those ceilings with the big white square ceiling tiles. You know the ones, every school, of every district, of every city, of every state has the exact same ones. What grabbed my attention on this particular day was a missing tile. Now a missing tile in the ceiling of a classroom was nothing new, except that this particular tile just happened to be right next to the wall.

Undistracted by the monotone voice of my American History professor, I stared up through the space left by the missing tile and was intrigued by the fact that the wall stopped only inches above the tiles. I quickly deduced that, if I were so inclined, there was nothing to prevent me from climbing through the hole and over the wall and dropping down onto the other side.

Our chemical storage room problem was solved!


After class, I found Dan and filled him in on my ceiling tile discovery. On our way home we made a brief, but thorough, detour through the science building to make a casual inspection of the ceiling tiles. After confirming that the building had the same tiles, and checking to be sure the bathroom window was unlocked, we hurried home to organize the evening’s plans.

Using our first mission as a guide, we again set our clocks for 3:00 am. We packed a flashlight, measuring spoons, two jars with lids, scissors and some duct tape in a backpack. Then spent the next few hours finalizing our plans.

The lab classrooms were each about 60-feet x 30-feet. The entrance to the rooms was about in the middle of the long wall. The door to the chemical storage room was the opposite wall straight across from the entrance. The front of each classroom was at one of the short ends of the room and had the lectern, the professor’s workstation and a pull down screen for slides and movies. There were rows of workstations with black countertops evenly spaced the length of the room. There were also blacktop workstations built along three of the walls. The only break in the countertops that lined the walls was at the two doors. We planned to get in the building and the classroom just as we had before, use the workstations against the walls for platforms, remove a ceiling tile and then up and over.

We tucked our floor plans and diagrams into the backpack and tried to get some sleep.

The clocks went off, but we really weren’t asleep. We got up, grabbed the backpack and our disk golf gear and headed out the door. Getting in the building and up to the second floor went without a hitch. That’s when we encountered our next problem.

Up until this point, neither of us had noticed a shelf that circled the room above the workstations about a foot below the ceiling. This shelf housed different kinds of science paraphernalia as well as several old science experiments.

We were at first a little disheartened by the discovery of this shelf. It was going to be pretty hard to get over this shelf and through the ceiling tile without breaking something.

To us it was imperative that we be invisible. If we could pull this off without anyone even suspecting that unwanted guests had been in the chemical supply room, it would make multiple trips possible, thereby granting us an inexhaustible supply of chemicals.

This shelf also presented the possibility that there were similar shelves on the other side of the wall as well, a problem we had failed to plan for. Attempting to improvise, we sat there discussing what to do next. Then a second unsettling thought occurred to us. It was quite possible that there were boxes, file cabinets or who knows what else stacked against the walls on the inside the storage room. We would be able to look down, but it might not be possible to avoid making a gigantic mess. Suddenly we had a high probability of an unsuccessful mission, and I was beginning to feel more like Inspector Clouseau than James Bond.

We were on the verge of giving it up for the night when we noticed that not only did the workstations along the walls stop at the doors, but there was a break in the shelf at the doors as well. In a flash, James Bond was back and the quest was on again.

Balancing on the edge of the workstations with feet propped against the doorframe, we carefully removed the ceiling tile next to the wall that was right above the door. With the tile off, we climbed up and perched ourselves on the wall between the two ceilings. Then we carefully removed the tile above the door on the inside, went over the wall and into the chemical storage room. Up and Over.

The chemical supply room didn’t have any windows, so as long as the doors were closed we could turn the lights on and take our time.

The supply room had row after row of floor to ceiling shelves, each packed with every kind of chemical you could imagine. We quickly discovered that the chemicals were in alphabetical order and finding the ones we needed couldn’t have been easier.

As we were getting our jars out of the backpack we noticed a workroom down at one end. We found bottles, beakers, scales, lids, labels and surgical gloves. It only seemed right that these chemicals should be placed, stored and labeled in their proper containers. Working quickly, but carefully we put on surgical gloves, and gathered the needed chemicals.

The first thing we noticed was that the school had several containers of each chemical. Our first impulse was to take a whole bottle of each, but if we did our “Invisible Thief” theory would be wasted. With the huge amount of chemicals in this lab we were fairly sure that nobody was using any one chemical on a regular basis. If this were true, then a little bit of one chemical missing out of a few bottles would not attract any attention. With each chemical, we took a small amount out of each of the bottles. Small enough so as not to look oddly low, but large enough to give us a good supply to work with at home. We corked the bottles, labeled them and stored them safely in the backpack. We then placed the bottles back on the shelves exactly as we had found them.

As we were getting ready to scale the wall and go back through our hole in the ceiling, we discovered that the door was only locked on the outside, some kind of fire law I guess. This made our exit much easier. We replaced the ceiling tiles, took few pairs of surgical gloves and turned off the lights as we walked out the door. We then slowly made our way down the back stairs and out the building.

We got home and went to work on our first batch.


Coming Soon...
Part 3: The Big Bang