what i did at work

I've been spending way too much time in the lab recently. There's just so many experiments I want to get done, and I want to do them all at the same time, and there's a few deadlines to meet, so I really gotta work hard... I'm overworking. Here's are some symptoms:

• 1. The majority of my daily liquid intake is coffee-based drinks.
• 2. In the past week I have at least once consumed a sugar-filled drink and counted it as a meal. (And I'm not talking Slim-Fast.) On at least one occasion, this was a coffee-based drink.
• 3. Another meal was a banana split and popcorn.
• 4. The only way to differentiate between my clean clothing and my dirty clothing is that the dirty pile is separated from the floor by a laundry basket.
• 5. In the refrigerator, my only belongings are: grapes, cold cuts, cheese, 2 ounces of Gatorade that I drank most of two weeks ago, and milk that expired on the 25th (note today's date...).
• 6. The average number of hours spent at work or doing work at home per day is a two-digit number.

yum...

I recognize the dangers in these symptoms and am taking care to not stress out too much and to get a grip on reality - life will not end if I don't do that experiment tomorrow, I know. I realize it's really bad when the fact that I was doing three experiments at the same time the other day led to this:

yum, too?

In the picture you see the white top of a hot-plate, upon which the glass beaker on the right was sitting. I was attempting to make one of my favorite recipes - Quick Paraformaldehyde - which involves filling the beaker with water, sticking in a tube of paraformaldehyde powder mixed with high-pH water, and warming the water to conduct heat to the paraformaldehyde (PFA is really tough to get to dissolve - in one lab I worked, I actually spent an entire day making PFA solution. Like, seriously an entire day). After about 10 minutes a few shakes of the tube in the hot water to encourage interactions between paraformaldehyde and water molecules, and you get a nice, clear paraformaldehyde solution. If you're busy, like me, you can cheat on that 10 minutes and leave it there for a while, and when you come back it will all be dissolved for you.

I was quite surprised when I did just that yesterday and came back to find that all the water had boiled away, the plastic tube with the PFA solution had melted when it came in contact with the burning empty hot glass beaker bottom, the PFA solution had also evaporated (thank goodness I always make the PFA in the fume hood - PFA is terribly toxic!), and now the plastic was melting to the bottom of the beaker, which was on the verge of cracking under the heat. Some quick reflexes enabled me to process all of this in about half a millisecond. I grabbed the plastic tube - NOT the glass beaker, since my sister has informed me that hot glass looks just like cold glass, but they don't feel the asme - and managed to gently slide the beaker off of the hot plate, somehow managing to not break the beaker.

That wasn't really the end of the story, though, because now the hot beaker was sitting on the absorptive pad lining the inside of the fume hood. In the photograph you will notice a now-distored circle of white surrounded by brown. That would be where I put the beaker, which promptly melted first few layers of the pad. The disgusting brown in the bottom of the beaker represents the ashes of layers, fused securely to the bottom of the beaker. If you look closely, you can also see the remnants of the part of the tube that melted inside the beaker, which stuck to the upper part of the beaker as I used it to steer the beaker away from the hot plate.

Pretty cool, huh? That's what I do at work...

Fortunately (sort of), today my work has come to a grinding halt. I got to work at 7 to start preparing my experiment for tomorrow (yeah, I need to start it going at least 24 hours in advance!), but when I arrived I found that my cells had been contaminated and were now sporting great blobs that are colonies of bacteria. Great... There goes that experiment. Then I figured out that something is not working with a second project, and I'm going to have to take about 10 steps back to figure out what is going wrong. But it's not all that bad - I don't have to work so much on the weekend since the weekend project got destroyed by the bacteria! And, while talking to someone about the non-working project, I was given some pre-made PFA that requires absolutely no boiling.

Somebody is watching out for me and my sanity.