Maybe, but picric acid becomes a shock explosive if it dries out. If the new guy didn’t know it was there, or it wasn’t labelled appropriately, then he may have just been playing it safe. You get the same thing with ether. They put BHT in it to extend its shelf life, but if you leave it more than six months mostly empty, nasty fickle little explosive peroxide crystals like to form near the bottle’s cap and the act of unscrewing the bottle is enough to set it off. The rule at a lot of institutions is that if it doesn’t have an expiration date, you call the bomb squad, because you can’t know whether there has been ether peroxide crystal formation. Similar precautions go for picric acid.
ETA: If @shaddack were here, I’m sure he’d chide me for being a chicken.
