How I Became A Convict

OK, so, this is where my dirty little secret comes out.

Shhh....are you ready? OK, here it goes....

i'm a convict.

 i have committed an illegal crime against the United States of America.

In chemistry class.

Now, you probably are all like "WHAT?!" right now and wondering what awful thing I did in chemistry. Trust me, it wasn't that bad. 

Here's the thing. I have defaced federal currency, which apparently is a crime. There goes my perfect record....

Anyway, the whole thing is sort of funny because it's all part of a lab we did this week in honors chem. It all started when our teacher rocked our worlds by telling us that by 1982, copper had gotten so expensive that they couldn't afford to make pennies out of it anymore. So they started making zinc pennies and just coat the outside with a thin sheet of copper. Crazy, right? I mean, WHO KNEW?

So we did a lab to figure out how true that was, and in the process ended up defacing several pennies.

FIRST- we sawed four chinks into the sides of the penny.

THEN- we dropped the pennies into hydrochloric acid

And lo and behold, this morning when we entered class, all that was left was a copper shell. The zinc was dissolved by the acid leaving just a very very paper thin sheet of metal with zinc dust still clinging to the inside. It was radical.

And that, my friends, is the story of how I became a convict.

*takes bow*