A week of work woes

[nwhiker]

Ugh. It's been a week. Not all bad, but not much great either.

I got some unexpected results that I knew were a fuck up on my part. The question was how far back did I make the mistake? Turns out at the middle step of five, and I'm pretty sure I can remember what was happening when I did: namely someone coming to talk with me urgently at a point when I needed to pay attention to what I was doing and I swapped two tubes. Blah. All fixed now, but ugh.

And the -20 was full of ice. Last time I needed trypsin, I had to really carefully get it out. Raul was chiseling -not a good idea- some stuff out earlier this week. And then on Wed, we could no longer close the door of the damn freezer without effort. It was time to defrost.



This is the top shelf after I'd pried about half of the boxes that were embedded in the ice out.



It took a lot of puppy pads, warm water, and persuasion. I was able to borrow a freezer for the night so I didn't have to overstuff our other -20. Anyhow long day.

And yes, in case anyone is wondering. That is a mercury thermometer in there. 😐 I need to get rid of it, I shudder at the consequences of it getting broken.

This morning, everything was good, we were at -12, so we transferred everything back. Only to have the temp shoot up to 5. Not good. Note that we'd put in stuff from another -20. It took a while and not opening the door to check the temp every 15 minutes like I wanted to, but it was at -15 when I left so fingers crossed.

My plan this weekend: find a place to buy a small plastic dragon or dinosaur and place it towards the back of the freezer. If the next person to defrost isn't me, hopefully they'll get a grin out of it.

Some of what I do in the lab is standard lab manager crap, which I loathe. Some of it is neuronal preps which means, yeah, killing mouse pups and the cell culture follow through of that. Those neurons go to Raul to do stuff with. Some of what I do is going back and making a systemic catalog of the DNA constructs in the lab, so bench work and database/Excel work, and I'm about half done with that. Some of what I'm supposed to be doing eventually if another department ever gets their act together is some drug screening but that will be almost no bench work (a few hours a week of routine cell culture work at most) and a lot of data analysis at the computer. But here's the deal. Raul has another job (downstairs and he said I can still ask him questions if need be. When the previous lab manager left there was a lot of knowledge lost, but at least Raul had been in the lab for four years and knows a lot). We were supposed to get another post doc staring in October but now it looks like, because of visa issues, that won't happen until next spring. That leaves me a) alone in the lab and b) without enough to do, even if the drug screening thing happens in a timely manner. I have no idea how this is going to work. Unless I can get a project involving neurons, it makes zero sense to maintain mice for over 6 months if we are not going to need a fresh supply of neurons. I don't feel comfortable sacrificing a bunch of mice over that amount of time so I can practice.

All this to say that I think I'm going to start checking out jobs again. I don't love this one enough deal with 6 months in a lab with no real direction and no overarching project beyond sitting at the computer analyzing FRET images.

Blah.

Comments

[siamese1]

I take it that a frost-free -20 doesn't exist? ;)

[nwhiker]

You'd think, right? I mean, it's a standard Kenmore freezer, I'm not sure why whomever purchased it didn't get a frost-free one!