So, I'm in a delivery, minding my own business, cleaning up the new mother, talking about her deliciously cute little boy that has just joined us, when I catch the glimmer of something liquid out of the corner of my eye.  Simultaneously, I feel a wet *splash* on the back of my neck.  I slowly turn my head, knowing something I would rather not have happened, happened, and there stood the first year resident, still in his gown, looking at me with horror in his eyes.  More than likely from the look of death in mine.  Because said resident was holding the syringe that he had used to inject lidocaine, and, in trying to help clean up, had squirted it into the placenta bucket.  Which is flat and low walled. And containing a placenta.  A messy, soggy, oogy placenta.  Now, anyone with a basic grasp of physics, as one would hope someone with not a few science classes under his belt would have, knows that shooting a liquid under pressure at a flat surface is going to cause some ricochet.  And then one of Newton's laws will then apply; either a body stays in motion (the lidocaine flying from the placenta bucket) until acted upon by an equal force (my neck) or the acceleration of a body is directly proportional to the force exerted and directly proportional to the mass.  Meaning the lidocaine hit me at about the speed of sound.

The resident stood there gawking while I hissed through clenched teeth, "Don't ever do that again."  He began to apologize profusely while I scrubbed at my neck with one of those "this-will-kill-everything-from-the-plague-to-mad-cow-disease-and-may-even-put-a-dent-in-herpes" wipes (you know, the ones that say never, in any circumstances, use on bare skin).  I spent the rest of the day dreaming of a bleach bath.