one big exhale never did me no good
I know I used to mention the departmental x-ray film developer a lot. Each piece of shared equipment is assigned to a professor, who is in charge of maintenance and repair. My boss got the dark room, which really means that I get to deal with the dark room.
Whatever, I develop multiple films every day, so it's not like I wasn't in there for a quarter of my day, anyway. I will say that it became much less convenient when my lab moved down one floor and to the other end of the building.
For a long time we had a lemon of a developer.
In order for it to function, we instituted a series of rules: take your gloves off (there's a piece of cardboard in film boxes, and with gloves on it feels like film; no one wants to have to clean out the entire machine because you put in cardboard instead of film, and it fell to pieces when soaked in fixer & developer solutions), don't cut film (flip your film for multiple exposures; smaller than 5x7 films get caught in the rollers between tanks), feed film into the machine a specific way, do not fill the chemical tanks with more than one bottle of concentrated reagent (otherwise the auto-fill water that dilutes the reagent will overflow, creating a mess that will require EH&S investigation) and if you have any questions, problems, or jams, CALL ME. (These last two points are pretty important.)
Even so, it was not unusual for me to receive multiple calls per day that a film had jammed, could I come extract it/fix it/do something.
(As you might imagine, this is not an efficient use of my time or departmental resources.)
Eventually we purchased a new developer. The exact same model. It was not as dysfunctional.
But some completely incompetent utterly illiterate asshat apparently cannot read the sign and ignored the departmental email that detailed the same information, and on multiple occasions in the past four months has filled the chemical tanks with twice the amount of concentrate that is necessary. This has led to three separate EH&S incidents caused by massive chemical spills that spread into the next room. The sheet-rock walls were permeated, and now they are moldy.
So the dark room is closed while it undergoes renovations. Of course, the chair's lab has their own developer system, so he didn't want to shell out money for this, but it had to be done for the other lab groups. And the admin he put in charge of organizing it didn't realize that the developer was used 7 days a week, starting at 10am and straight through to 7 or 8pm. She was dismayed to realize that we would have to organize an alternative.
On one hand: yay, an alternative. All research doesn't grind to a halt. OTOH: minimal hours of availability, three floors and one building away. :/
Today Yesterday, I had 8 blots to develop. I have climbed at least 20 flights of stairs. I am tempted to start taking the elevator.
Also in work fuckery, I still don't know what to do about Post-Doc. She just... she's messy. She's inconsiderate of others in common spaces. And she's lazy, OMG.
We make SDS buffer for whole-cell lysates, because it solubilizes everything. It's got protease and phosphatase inhibitors, plus SDS, a detergent. The inhibitors require long-term storage at 4C, but SDS is insoluble at that temperature, so before use it should be warmed up to bring the detergent (which is looks flaky and white - like soap, obvsly) into solution.
I found the common bottle in the fridge, and was mildly annoyed that there were only 2mL left, but that was going to be enough for my experiment, so I stuck it in the water bath to warm up. Thirty minutes later, when I checked it, the SDS was in solution, but the buffer was cloudy and I could see that there was a grey-brownish clump of contamination floating in it. So I asked Post-Doc, who used the buffer the previous day, if it had been okay then. Her response? No, there was a floater in it, but she figured it was just part of a paper towel or a bit of the lid's lining fallen into the buffer, so she used it anyway.
...uh. No. No one just sticks a paper towel into a bottle of common reagent. And the lid's interior lining was intact. So she harvested an entire experiment of 30 samples with contaminated buffer, because she has no fucking common sense, and is too lazy to make fresh. That was days of work, reagents and cells, and now the result is unusable. :/
On the not-work front, Matt Nathanson was at the House of Blues the other night. He is the MOST entertaining when it comes to between-song banter. Brandi Carlile was there last night, but by the time I was out of work, appropriately exercised, and hosed off, I didn't have the energy to drive back in from the 'burbs. :( Next time. (See, one more reason we need to abandon the Borg 'burbs and move inside the loop.)
This weekend: The Seagull at the Alley. Possibly a 40-mile bike ride. Editing fic. Maaaaybe setting a goal of words-per-week for myself, to kick-start myself into plotting and writing the GK/Casablanca AU or Brad/Walt fics that live in my head lately. And booking our vacation. Which, in the end, is probably going to be hiking in Peru.
Crossposted at http://asimplechord.dreamwidth.org/514014.html; comment as/where you wish.
Whatever, I develop multiple films every day, so it's not like I wasn't in there for a quarter of my day, anyway. I will say that it became much less convenient when my lab moved down one floor and to the other end of the building.
For a long time we had a lemon of a developer.
In order for it to function, we instituted a series of rules: take your gloves off (there's a piece of cardboard in film boxes, and with gloves on it feels like film; no one wants to have to clean out the entire machine because you put in cardboard instead of film, and it fell to pieces when soaked in fixer & developer solutions), don't cut film (flip your film for multiple exposures; smaller than 5x7 films get caught in the rollers between tanks), feed film into the machine a specific way, do not fill the chemical tanks with more than one bottle of concentrated reagent (otherwise the auto-fill water that dilutes the reagent will overflow, creating a mess that will require EH&S investigation) and if you have any questions, problems, or jams, CALL ME. (These last two points are pretty important.)
Even so, it was not unusual for me to receive multiple calls per day that a film had jammed, could I come extract it/fix it/do something.
(As you might imagine, this is not an efficient use of my time or departmental resources.)
Eventually we purchased a new developer. The exact same model. It was not as dysfunctional.
But some completely incompetent utterly illiterate asshat apparently cannot read the sign and ignored the departmental email that detailed the same information, and on multiple occasions in the past four months has filled the chemical tanks with twice the amount of concentrate that is necessary. This has led to three separate EH&S incidents caused by massive chemical spills that spread into the next room. The sheet-rock walls were permeated, and now they are moldy.
So the dark room is closed while it undergoes renovations. Of course, the chair's lab has their own developer system, so he didn't want to shell out money for this, but it had to be done for the other lab groups. And the admin he put in charge of organizing it didn't realize that the developer was used 7 days a week, starting at 10am and straight through to 7 or 8pm. She was dismayed to realize that we would have to organize an alternative.
On one hand: yay, an alternative. All research doesn't grind to a halt. OTOH: minimal hours of availability, three floors and one building away. :/
Today Yesterday, I had 8 blots to develop. I have climbed at least 20 flights of stairs. I am tempted to start taking the elevator.
Also in work fuckery, I still don't know what to do about Post-Doc. She just... she's messy. She's inconsiderate of others in common spaces. And she's lazy, OMG.
We make SDS buffer for whole-cell lysates, because it solubilizes everything. It's got protease and phosphatase inhibitors, plus SDS, a detergent. The inhibitors require long-term storage at 4C, but SDS is insoluble at that temperature, so before use it should be warmed up to bring the detergent (which is looks flaky and white - like soap, obvsly) into solution.
I found the common bottle in the fridge, and was mildly annoyed that there were only 2mL left, but that was going to be enough for my experiment, so I stuck it in the water bath to warm up. Thirty minutes later, when I checked it, the SDS was in solution, but the buffer was cloudy and I could see that there was a grey-brownish clump of contamination floating in it. So I asked Post-Doc, who used the buffer the previous day, if it had been okay then. Her response? No, there was a floater in it, but she figured it was just part of a paper towel or a bit of the lid's lining fallen into the buffer, so she used it anyway.
...uh. No. No one just sticks a paper towel into a bottle of common reagent. And the lid's interior lining was intact. So she harvested an entire experiment of 30 samples with contaminated buffer, because she has no fucking common sense, and is too lazy to make fresh. That was days of work, reagents and cells, and now the result is unusable. :/
On the not-work front, Matt Nathanson was at the House of Blues the other night. He is the MOST entertaining when it comes to between-song banter. Brandi Carlile was there last night, but by the time I was out of work, appropriately exercised, and hosed off, I didn't have the energy to drive back in from the 'burbs. :( Next time. (See, one more reason we need to abandon the Borg 'burbs and move inside the loop.)
This weekend: The Seagull at the Alley. Possibly a 40-mile bike ride. Editing fic. Maaaaybe setting a goal of words-per-week for myself, to kick-start myself into plotting and writing the GK/Casablanca AU or Brad/Walt fics that live in my head lately. And booking our vacation. Which, in the end, is probably going to be hiking in Peru.
Crossposted at http://asimplechord.dreamwidth.org/514014.html; comment as/where you wish.