The award started in the 1960s, was discontinued, then revived about 15 years ago.
Some of the winning stories have been doozies:
*The faculty member who, while carrying a new refrigerator, damaged the ceiling and sheared off overhead sprinklers, starting a flood.
*The graduate student who spilled 400 gallons of bovine blood (for a coagulation study) off the back of his pickup truck on Pacific Avenue NE, causing a major traffic jam.
*The administrative assistant who lost a chicken sandwich in her desk, and forgot about it. Two months later, the stench was so bad that maintenance workers demolished a wall, thinking there was a dead animal trapped inside.
*The faculty member who wrapped an ether-soaked rat in a towel, placed it in a refrigerator, and went home. The resulting explosion the next morning took out 26 windows in the D-Wing.
"When you make a goof like that, you cringe and hope you won't get nominated," says Lynett Kimmel, the department's graduate program assistant who won last year for sending a grad school application to a prison inmate.
"Sometimes too much attention is made to advances in science," Walsh says. "We just like to honor those who have moved science in the other direction."
5,308,397 microfiche/microcards
266,771 maps/aerial photographs
332,491
photos/positive
256,031 photo negatives
25,168
audiotapes/audiocassettes
On average, every day:
24,468 people enter
8,804 books are checked out
6,017 books are
used in the libraries
27,738 photocopies are made
1,799 reference
questions are answered in person
417 questions are answered over the
phone
195 new volumes are added
Checking out
8,804 books are checked out every day
60,951 books are checked out
every week
264,120 books are checked out every month
3,169,445 books are
checked out every year
Source: UW Libraries
--Angie Marzetta, former Husky All-American softball player who is now a member of the Colorado Silver Bullets baseball team.
Send a letter to the editor at griffin@u.washington.edu.
Return to December 1995 Table of Contents.