fun things to do in lab
- accidentally crushing a pcr tube when opening it with one hand
- dropping… anything. especially an entire box of frozen samples.
- slightly too large gloves and getting them caught as you close tubes
- when the magnetic spin bar spins too fast and does the thing
- listening to someone else’s forgotten timer go off
- “uh… what’s that smell..”
- going in for a pipette tip and then overturning the entire box
- 16 hour time-points
- srsly who invented 16 hr time-points
- they’re inhumane
- labelling rows and rows of 600 ul microcentrifuge tubes by hand
- “we’re sorry but this reagent has been back-ordered for 3 months”
- listening to the scraping noise of plastic culture flasks on metal shelves
- getting your samples stuck in any sort of machine
- “i need you to go and catalog every chemical we have”
- cleaning cell culture incubators with aerosolized 70% ethanol
- having the fire alarms go off when you’re literally in the middle of something that can not be put down no i will perish in this fire before i forgo this damn experiment!
- that sense of pure panic when you realize you miscalculated how much reagent you need
- “one of your mice died and its cage mates ate half the body”
#relatable
- pipetting small amounts of different clear reagents into your samples and then forgetting if you added it to that sample yet
- trying to decipher the labeling on a tube from a lab member who is long gone
- “did you read the paper for journal club?”
- balancing a very sensitive centrifuge
- calculating the amount of something you need to add only to realize that you did the math for the anhydrous not the hydrate you actually have
- adjusting the pH of buffers for a solid half hour
- “has anyone picked up packages for the last week and a half?”
- trying to figure out which pipette aid actually works
- finding a bottle of the reagent you need only to find that it’s like fifteen years old and hoping it’s still good
So accurate it hurts
*realizing your definition of 1:2 dilution is different from your lab mate’s definition (1+1 vs. 1+2)