I sometimes worry I'll have the same thing happen to me, raxy. Only with it taking a rather large helping of luck for it to be scented. Or as benign (relatively speaking) as crap. Although lets just say after one nasty surprise almost had, courtesy of my father, involving his gutting a broken E-cig battery (still charged, just the control contact wiring buggered) I'm pretty careful unwrapping packages by now :lol:
(if your wondering, it was a huge lithium battery from one of those high capacity variable output e-cigs, the circuitry failed, battery still full charge, and whilst my dad is anything but a chemist, he does know a few things he's picked up from me, such as that I'll make use of battery electrode foils to save money on lithium if I don't need huge weight or molar quantities of it; or else I'll use it for reactions that need or can be accomplished using lithium metal, and ideally make use of Li that has a very large surface area to weight ratio, such as processes involving exposure of the metal to gases, where one wants as much lithium as possible to be in contact with the gas for whatever it is one is doing.
So...he went into the shed, and obviously removed the shell from the battery, returning with the inner electrode, not realizing that of course, being an alkali metal, it was already beginning to oxidize (I'm surprised it didn't start to get too hot to touch before he even got it into the room I was in in the house)....what did I get...a 'package' he'd opened, tossed into my lap, whilst sat on the sofa, with a cheerful 'hey here you are'.
A by then really bloody hot package, resulting in a frantic sprint over to the lab for a bucket of petroleum spirits to chuck it in, passing it madly from hand to hand as I ran for it, before his little gift went from burning my hand to just plain burning [metal-fires are REAL shits to put out, as they burn really, really hot, ever seen magnesium ribbon being lit whilst held in tongs in school lab classes? lithium does that too, only rather than a blazing, brilliant blinding white, the color is a scarlet-pinkish flame, and one needs special fire extinguishers for metal fires in general, as they can burn hot enough to split CO2 for example, which would just feed it fuel, although it can work on a small scale. Li also reacts with CO2, as well as oxygen, and, unlike the other alkali metals, it reacts with elemental nitrogen which is to most things, inert, forming a superbase called lithium nitride. On a small scale, the cooling from a continuous sudden discharge of a fire extinguisher SHOULD put it out, but only if its small. And of course you can't use water, as it splits under the heat and you just get a bigger mess still. And halon-type fire extinguishers would be outright dangerous, and risk splitting up the halon/freon-like stuff in them and creating really, really nasty things like phosgene and fluorophosgene (one breath of either would kill the victim quite easily if there is enough of a concentration in the air, and with phosgene that is NOT very much at all, afaik fluorophosgene is even nastier stuff still, a few milligrams of either per square meter is enough to be highly dangerous and if the exposure is not very brief (in a 'runthefuckaway' kind of brief sort of way), potentially fatal. (phosgene is carbonyl chloride, (C=O)Cl2, fluorophosgene being the same, only carbonyl fluoride, where fluorine replaces those two chlorine atoms, and they are both of them the stuff of chemist's nightmares. COCl2 was used in chemical warfare too, in the trench warfare era, as a mask-penetrating replacement for chlorine gas, with the added 'bonus' of its also being, rather than having the acutely obvious, stinking, choking nature of Cl2, of very faint, old hay-like odor [you have no idea how much I wish I didn't know that other than by reading....and no I wasn't deliberately making the stuff], not irritating, just....later after exposure you develop pulmonary oedema and drown in your own blood plasma filling your lungs..
So dealing with metal fires is a bitch, the best way is to stop one ever happening in the first place, hence my frantic dash for a tub, and some petroleum spirits to fill it and chuck in the skinned battery my old man had thrown into my lap before it could have a proper chance at catching fire.
(not quite as demented as it sounds, since alkali metals are stored under paraffin-type inert hydrocarbons a lot, I've got some sodium for example that I prepared via electrolysis and its sitting under lighter fluid in a stoppered jar, to prevent it oxidizing or catching fire; although my lab-grade lithium is stored dry, in a jar purged with dry argon, in the inner of the two bags it came sealed in, with a corner cut off the bag for taking pieces out, and the bottom of the jar the bag is kept in partially filled with a mixture of magnesium powder to scrub traces of oxygen, and anhydrous calcium chloride, although I think I will change that absorbent/oxygen scrubber mixture to a blend of magnesium powder and quicklime, CaO, or possibly iron dust and CaO, to form iron oxide, which of course are colored, so oxidation can be visually monitored since anhydrous calcium chloride turns into a viscous liquid when it absorbed water, whilst CaO turns into Ca(OH)2, which is a powder still, so less mess potential, not that I actually ever intend on letting a fill-up of dessicant/oxygen absorbent mixture.
For a DIY-ed alternative to storing the lab-grade lithium under mineral spirits or oils (its really light, of low density and unless held or weighted-down it actually floats on petrol, so with storing it in inert gas it can't try bobbing back up to the surface and starting all kinds of flaming nastiness:LOL1:)
So you got off lightly 'raxy, with your scented crap covering your fingers.
(taken in isolation, that last sentence really reads SO wrong! there just aren't words that even begin to do it justice in terms of wrongness. That does NOT read quite the way I'd intended it to)
