Ah, acne! How I've missed you!
How do I know I'm stressed? Acne! And when I try to speak in the morning, it sounds like someone's taken a cheese grater to my voice box. What's the good of being an adult if all the worst parts of puberty don't go away?
Anyway, being a TA for microbiology without any previous micro experience sucks balls is fantastic! I'm learning something useless new every day! Like today, for example, I learned that you DO NOT AUTOCLAVE SS agar. I know, you're thinking, "But agtmacgyver, if you can't autoclave agar, how do you keep it sterile while you're pouring it into the plates?" Silly n00b! I have no fucking clue! It's easy! You just insert your flurdle into the hoopenwagon, and extrude its shiggenaden onto the buttritrundle. Dur!
I also learned that the other TA just doesn't give a shit is always looking out for me. When I told him yesterday that I hadn't made agar plates since high school, and I didn't really remember how to do it, he said to just follow the directions in either my lab manual or on the agar bottle itself and I should be fine. Well, the directions were poorly written and obtuse slightly misleading. For example, my lab manual said to autoclave all media and agar at 121 deg. C for 15 minutes unless otherwise noted, and there was no DO NOT AUTOCLAVE note next to the SS agar. And yet, on the SS agar bottle, in big, scary letters it said, "All ye who badmouth microbiology shall be punished! DO NOT AUTOCLAVE." So I didn't autoclave and we'll see how many plates are growing little friends before lab starts on Wednesday.
On the other hand, both the lab manual and the bottle for the EMB agar said, "Ow! My inner thigh! Autoclave the bloody hell out of this stuff! It'll be fine!" So I did. Twenty minutes later I had one solid mass of 50 melted petri dishes. Of course the petri dishes weren't autoclavable! It's not like they were weren't labeled in any way! I briefly considered setting something on fire just going home at this point, but no. I wasn't going to let the gelatin win. So I spent another hour and a half making another batch of EMB. And that's it! I only spent 6 hours of my Saturday floundering working through basic micro stuff. Sure, it probably would've taken the other TA only about 20 minutes to show me what to do, but would I have really learned anything from that? Yes.
Anyway, being a TA for microbiology without any previous micro experience sucks balls is fantastic! I'm learning something useless new every day! Like today, for example, I learned that you DO NOT AUTOCLAVE SS agar. I know, you're thinking, "But agtmacgyver, if you can't autoclave agar, how do you keep it sterile while you're pouring it into the plates?" Silly n00b! I have no fucking clue! It's easy! You just insert your flurdle into the hoopenwagon, and extrude its shiggenaden onto the buttritrundle. Dur!
I also learned that the other TA just doesn't give a shit is always looking out for me. When I told him yesterday that I hadn't made agar plates since high school, and I didn't really remember how to do it, he said to just follow the directions in either my lab manual or on the agar bottle itself and I should be fine. Well, the directions were poorly written and obtuse slightly misleading. For example, my lab manual said to autoclave all media and agar at 121 deg. C for 15 minutes unless otherwise noted, and there was no DO NOT AUTOCLAVE note next to the SS agar. And yet, on the SS agar bottle, in big, scary letters it said, "All ye who badmouth microbiology shall be punished! DO NOT AUTOCLAVE." So I didn't autoclave and we'll see how many plates are growing little friends before lab starts on Wednesday.
On the other hand, both the lab manual and the bottle for the EMB agar said, "Ow! My inner thigh! Autoclave the bloody hell out of this stuff! It'll be fine!" So I did. Twenty minutes later I had one solid mass of 50 melted petri dishes. Of course the petri dishes weren't autoclavable! It's not like they were weren't labeled in any way! I briefly considered setting something on fire just going home at this point, but no. I wasn't going to let the gelatin win. So I spent another hour and a half making another batch of EMB. And that's it! I only spent 6 hours of my Saturday floundering working through basic micro stuff. Sure, it probably would've taken the other TA only about 20 minutes to show me what to do, but would I have really learned anything from that? Yes.