Notes from the real world

Old Ben is my favourite physicist. These are transcribed as verbatim as I can remember:
“The theory was, if you’re going to cock-up, make it a big one. I think my biggest cock-up was when I was working with the disc-thinner. We had this device that would fire these ions at a spinning disc, to thin it out until it was only a few atoms thick, and then you could do your scatter experiments on it. And we got this sample of moon dust. This was back when moon dust was a pretty exciting thing. But our sample was oxidised and we couldn’t do aything with it.
“So what I did was, I put it in a little cup, and put this cup in front of the ion beam. I put the cup on top of this vibrating stand, so that the shaking motion would separate the oxidised particles and we could skim them off the top with the ion beam. I thought it was pretty clever. And then one day I knocked the stand with my knee, and that was it: curtains. This fine moon dust all over the floor, gone.
“I got away with it for a few weeks though. I got a call from the guy I’d passed the cup onto, and he said he’d been looking in his microscope and there was no crystalline structure in our moon dust sample. And I said, no, there won’t be. It’s fag ash.”
“How can a momentumless object spin? I remember one of my tutorials. The tutor was this Australian guy, rough as arseholes he was. He was explaining how these particles with n =1 can have spin, but no angular momentum. Or something. I remember putting my hand up and asking, but how come it doesn’t fall into the nucleus if it doesn’t have any angular momentum. And he looks at me and he says, ‘Ben, fuck off.’”
One of many other Ben stories vying for space: you know those squeezy balls full of liquid? No matter how hard you crush them, they never burst. They usually have glitter or plastic eyeballs inside; this one had our company’s logo on a little plaque, some deranged past attempt at promotion. Thomas found it lurking in one of the many nooks of our lab, and declared it disgusting, dropping it back on the desk like a dead rat, wondering aloud who on Earth thought that making such a thing would be a good idea. As soon as Ben walks in he picks it up, and squeezes it, and says, “It’s like a breast.” Then he puts it in his shirt pocket and says, “Thomas, feel my breast.”