I seem to have acquired a Thursday Curse. For the past month, every Thursday has been incessantly busy at work. I, of course, make my schedule, so I am really the only one to blame. There are other factors - when certain people are available to aid me, when reagents can be shipped to me, and at what times I can use various machines. But truly it's me, and for some reason I seem to have decided that since I don't have anything to do on Thursday evenings, that means I can stay at work for 16 hours and do ridiculous amounts of work. It is thus no surprise that it is on Thursdays (or in preparation for Thursdays) that bad things occur.
Last Thursday was one of those days... I shall present to you the amusements of my life in pictures:
It all started with this tube.
I put some stuff into the tube, and moments later it transformed into this. This was not supposed to happen. The pointy end inverted into the inside of the tube, and then the pointy part got so disfigured that it broke open, so the stuff I put into it came out.
The culprit - a centrifuge...
...because of this...
...and not this.
Since the stuff I had put into the tube was bacteria, I really needed to clean up everything upon which it had leaked through the pointy-end hole. Fortunately, when you put tubes into that centrifuge, they sit in a bucket, so that meant I just needed to clean the bucket. I washed it out, and then I reached to get a wipe to dry the bucket.
I reached over this.
And then this happened. That meant the water went everywhere. Amazingly, it did not get on me, just the floor. Also amazingly, the glass beaker that I knocked over did not break!
I put some stuff into the tube, and moments later it transformed into this. This was not supposed to happen. The pointy end inverted into the inside of the tube, and then the pointy part got so disfigured that it broke open, so the stuff I put into it came out.
The culprit - a centrifuge...
...because of this...
...and not this.Since the stuff I had put into the tube was bacteria, I really needed to clean up everything upon which it had leaked through the pointy-end hole. Fortunately, when you put tubes into that centrifuge, they sit in a bucket, so that meant I just needed to clean the bucket. I washed it out, and then I reached to get a wipe to dry the bucket.
I reached over this.
And then this happened. That meant the water went everywhere. Amazingly, it did not get on me, just the floor. Also amazingly, the glass beaker that I knocked over did not break!Not as traumatic as a near-fire, but it was fairly amusing and caused many more problems than I had anticipated. However, like I said, in the end there was a happy ending to my long and tiring day at the lab. But that will have to wait for tomorrow...
1 comment:
Ruth I recently used a centrifuge for the first time in a long while. Nichole and I went upstairs with the E. Coli sample, signed in the lab book, and set up the 'fuge. Once it was running we went back to our lab to read. About 25 minutes later we return, check out that everything is going well. The centrifuge reads 29:30, so I assume there is 30 second left on our 30 minutes spin, so we go look for filters next door. We return to find the centrifuge reading 29:27, strange...wait that's 29 HOURS 27 minutes! How that for stupidty the physical chemist didn't even know that a centrifuge could be run for 30 hours.
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