nwhiker | A miserable work week (Reply)

Wow, that was a hideous work week to be honest.

Lab inspection by EH&S at the end of the month. Our last -last year, long before I was hired- was well below UW and departmental average and barely out of the "red danger!" zone that apparently means they come back more often to check things out. Needless to say... this is not going to fly.

I mean... Severus Snape may have been my favorite HP character, but the one I most identify with is Hermione Granger.

So. Armed with the three-page check list of things they check for, I started going through the lab. I've been cleaning up since I got there, clearing off benches and making sure that all boxes overhead are behind the shelf "lip". If the Big One hits, it won't make a diff, but in a smaller quake, we at least won't all die killed by a box of 50ml Falcon tubes.

One thing that became obvious this week is that... the chemical inventory needed to get done.

So I did it and it was fucking miserable. I added about 150 entries to our list that had about 220 when I started. I'm not 100% sure I got everything (the -20 freezers had a lot of boxes that I don't think had more chemicals in them), but I got a lot more than was there. There are about 20 chemicals that we supposedly have but I cannot locate in the lab. I'll try to find them again at some point, but if I can't, I'll delete them. Not yet, though. I cheated a bit: I found an entry in the database that I could use (hey, some other lab entered it!) for "Primary and Secondary Antibodies" that had an SDS, so I just said we had about 60 of those, rather than entering each one individually. There are more than 60, but that was a first estimate that I will update. There is really no need to enter each antibody individually.

I should defrost the freezers, but it's too hot to do now. Maybe next winter.

The place where I expect we'll lose the most points is training. I'm up to date and I've asked everyone to catch up on training, but nobody is really doing it. Raul continues to bring food and drink into the lab, sigh, so I'll just tell him to STAY AWAY on inspection day, LOL.

Next week I'll finish labelling all the secondary containers in the 4C, and try and figure out how to realistically label the lines that go from the CO2 cylinders to the incubators.... passing through the ceiling, and try to figure out where the O2 line goes: two lines go behind the biosafety cabinet, only one comes out, so. 😂

So yeah. Long week.