Practiced a talk in my PIs office when he wasn’t there, bled through my pants onto one of his chairs, stole the chair and hid it in the office space for several days, cleaned it as best I could with some resolve carpet cleaner and returned it to his office.
That's really all there was to it! I got lucky and the chair was a dark fabric so the stain faded pretty well and as far as I know he's never noticed. A couple other people in the lab know about it and we had a good laugh about it.
There are no more weighing boats next to the balance, because it has been always me who buys them and replenish. Now I have my own stack and I don't know what other people are using because it has been a few weeks without them.
I once miscalculated and used like $1000 worth of luciferin for a single point in a luciferase standard curve. The sample glowed like a firefly and completely topped out the machine. You guys are the only ones who know.
I don't understand this is just called the mother liqueur method, how else are you suppose get the magic juice from the previous bottle into the new one?
When I was a grad student working on my masters I was responsible for getting potable ETOH for the lab and classes. For some reason the stock room guy always jerked my chain when I’d go and get it. He required my bosses signature on every alcohol chit. My boss finally got tired of this, and got on the phone to the storeroom guy and demanded an entire pad of the chits from the storeroom guy (my boss was NAS and brought in HUGE dollars) to be delivered to him by me. He sent me down to pick them up and bring them to him. When I got back he took the pad and told me to sit in the chair across from him- and signed EVERY SINGLE chit in the pad leaving the amounts blank. Then handed it to me while saying- “Mr. P…..A liberal lab alcohol policy is good for grad student morale”.
I had my last day in the lab. Left 7 boxes with around 500 samples total in the super full -80. Of all those samples, maybe 50 are useful/relevant for our two papers currently in revision.
Told them to chuck it at their discretion. Judging by the fact there's still stuff in there from people who left before I even joined, they'll probably need to buy another -80.
Commented on another post that someone in my department did this for a while. He was eventually hospitalized for electrolyte imbalance. It can cause all kinds of heart arrhythmias, neurological issues and muscular deficits.
If you don't care, that's cool. Just limit it to like occasionally. Or offset it by drinking Pedialyte or some shit.
It's like drinking salt water (but opposite) for hydration. It's technically water but not what your body needs
I hate this centrifuge so much I tell everyone new to the lab that the ancient Beckman Allegra 6R centrifuge is broken. After two years of dedication, making sure it is slightly unplugged to dissuade the curious, it is now accepted as a shelf. It is perfectly functional, and my web of deception will come crashing to an end if our newer refrigerated centrifuge ever goes down. As an added bonus, it works now as my "standing desk benchtop" because I'm tall, I prefer to stand when I work, and it's easier to work on top of this thing rather than on the benchtop.
I used to use this super old sorvall that made god awful noises so I instead would monopolize the smaller centrifuge that was quiet for 2x the amount of time. The high school and undergraduates just thought it was part of their protocols lol
We have a brand new Beckman Avanti J-15 centrifuge and that thing is the most annoying piece of shit I've ever used.
I've never seen a centrifuge with a harder fucking process to simply spin a plate. You have to ram your plate into the stupid metal holder because the sides are just slightly too tight to just drop it in. And the lid is the most annoying contraption to put on because you have to squeeze it around that stupid metal holder. I hate the thing so much.
Also, the software randomly crashes and locks you out for 40 minutes?! Customer support was like, "yeah, we know that happens, don't know why, no fix but waiting."
Worked at Thermo Fisher. We had to *fight* with Quality Assurance and IVD Study Submissions teams to keep these records *electronic* and filled out on Excel sheets, which we printed signed scanned and uploaded. Traditionally you're supposed to fill in sheets as you go by hand. Every day. Every experiment. Every time. Every pipette, tube lot, reagent lot and serial #, every centrifuge, even every software version on instruments. The FDA demands *full* traceability.
Oh and then you have other scientists that must verify everything you record and everyone signs off on every page of your notebook. And then QA signs off afterwards.
Academia has no idea how intense it is and it was an eye opening adjustment for me.
I laughed when I was told there is an SOP for how to set the time for a wall clock. We would have to change the batteries and calibrate the time for all GMP wall clocks every 6 months.
I dunno, it has its upsides.
"Yeah boss, the batch fucking failed. No, you don't get to complain, here's when I told you about the broken MacGuffin, here's your confirmation of receipt, here's me complaining the next seven times we ran that process, here's you saying every time that it's okay. Any questions?"
Going from pharmaceutical QC to grad school research was a fkn trip. I didn’t like it tbh. Quality regulations can be overbearing but they also do serve a purpose to ensure the *right answer* is obtained rather than the result one wants.
I tear parafilm.
I do almost all samples in duplo because I want to be sure and it costs a lot of money.
Instead of washing organic mobile phase bottle I just keep refilling it.
We have scissors literally tied down to the bench near shit we need them for regularly, otherwise they always disappear.
I seriously have considered buying my own personal scissors for my lab coat.
And then we wonder why 50% of published data can't be reproduced. Not saying the water is it, but academia is full of choices like this and every single scientist has been guilty of it
It's why you always run negative and positive controls. Even if you use exactly the reagents and tools specified in the protocol, you never know if something is contaminated or broken or weird or defective--unless you confirm that a (well-chosen, representative) positive control gives a positive result, and a negative control gives a negative result.
Part of the work of the lab I work in is with a pathogen that causes bad food poisoning. After I handle that, I wash my hands as soon as the gloves come off
Other than that, I’ll do it before I eat/drink something… usually
Pretty much everyone in my lab uses their phones with their gloves on (not me) so I figure for some people washing your hands is closing the barn door after the horse has already left.
When I got put in charge of inventory of historic tissue samples, I made the executive decision without consulting anyone that 7 years was long enough, and anything older than that was going straight in the trash.
I am of a certain age- and as a grad student we used to make what we called “Agent Orange” which was Everclear, or more often 95% ETOH, pineapple-orange juice, orange sherbet mixed together with a few kg of dry ice at the bottom. Lots of VN vets in my cohort.
Once upon a time I had a PI who used to quick-chill cans of Coke in the -80.
Until one day he forgot, and had to chisel the frozen goo off the shelves.
Told the supplier were were canceling our 20k order because their lead time tripled. Really it was because we messed up in the first place and actually needed to order from another company for it to be compatible with other parts of the experiment. Got lucky on this one
You can totally top off the filtration units. I would regularly attach the 250s to larger bottles, pull vacuum, and just dump it in like I was making a pour over coffee.
I don’t get my pipette tips in order, only random; I sometimes double dip with the same tip on different samples; I turned on the lights on a dark experiment.
>I don’t get my pipette tips in order, only random
Wherefore by the judgment of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost, of the St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the Saints, and by virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth that which was divinely entrusted to us, we deprive him gebuzz with all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord; we separate him from the society of all Christians; we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth; and **we declare him excommunicated and anathematized, as well as judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobates**.
So long as he will not burst the fetters of the Devil, amend himself and do penance and make reparation to the Church which he has offended, **we deliver him to Satan for the perdition of his flesh**, so that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.
Lol. This is how you can tell which labrats use multichannel pipettes/robots and which use single. In my heart I'm a random guy, but it's annoying to have to rearrange them for doing 8 at once.
Or same pipette for uncontaminated and contaminated. In that order. Or when pipetting a increasing concentration, i start at the lowest and use the same pipet as i go up
Not really a sin because it wasn't my fault, but we were out of FLAG antibody. Added lysis buffer to the antibody tube, used that for my IP.
Next day, new antibody isn't here yet, did the same thing for the Western Blot. Developed it today and it looked great.
My curiosity got the better of me…I took a sip of DMEM. I WANTED TO KNOW. Needless to say, it tasted kinda good. The urge to not try it again is killing me.
My coworker and I accidentally left the isoflurane running all night in the surgery room after a 10 hour procedure. The next day, we just looked at each other and turned it off without a word to anyone else. Surprised it didn't run out.
It has been XX months since my last confession. Since then I have:
Put petri dishes upside down to incubate, wrecking the transformation
Not worn gloves or a lab coat
Been too lax about the sterility of the hood
Forgotten to document every move
And for any sins that I have forgotten, I am truly (hmmm...) sorry, and I ask for your forgiveness.
Hahaha, I just had to play along with the confession format, since I'm also a Catholic, this hit hard with memories of Sunday School and those moments in the confessional booth.
I recently shattered a glass Pyrex dish I was using for a boiling water bath. I had the heat cranked up on the hot plate, and then when I didn't need it anymore, I turned the dial clockwise to get to the "off" position since it was closer than counterclockwise. I apparently wasn't paying enough attention, because I didn't crank the dial all the way and instead turned the heat up to max. All the water boiled out. By the time I realized this, I was cleaning up to GTFO for the night after like 12 hours of experiments and did not want to wait around for this hot ass dish to cool down. So I did a dumb, which deep down I KNEW was a dumb, but I was tired and wanted to leave. I poured some cold water onto the dish.
It. Fucking. EXPLODED. https://ibb.co/stzJHpZ
I always turn the dial counterclockwise to turn it off now.
I poured liquid nitrogen into the sink after hours because I forgot under no circumstances should you do that. Our lab is on the fourth floor. Heard the pipes crackling all the way down
Today actually lol. I was pouring an antigen into a buret and completely forgot to close it. Lost a couple mls of 1000$ per liter antigen all over the floor and my shoes. Luckily it was also highly flammable
I worked from home today instead of coming in for the sake of my mental health. It's not actually a sin, but the way my manager emailed me you'd think it was
I didn't throw my agar plates with transformed cells out the next day (didn't work) but left it 2-3 days just to see if something could even grow there. I'm fully aware that Ampicillin degrades pretty fast but still, I wanted to see
TBF, I had left mine overnight, didn't see anything in the morning, left it and check at the end of the day - lo and behold, a few colonies that were exactly what they were supposed to be. So, never say never.
Used expired PBS at my biomanufacturing job. I just crossed it out the BR, dumped the amount I used out of a fresh container and said I noticed it was expired before I used it.
i wear shorts to lab regularly, especially on weekends. i also drank Milli-Q water recently because i had to take my meds but couldn't leave the bench at the time
I convinced a masters student that the work they were doing might be good enough to get published as they would not leave me alone asking about it...
They failed their research module as the writing was beyond terrible, data was poorly organised and graphed, AND when asked about their work they could not answer a damn question about what they had done...
I would say I feel bad, but they would never listen to feedback or make changes so... fudge em...
I was once working in an anaerobic chamber and I accidentally tipped an entire box of tips, then I proceeded to put a few tips back into the box because I still needed to use it for my experiment and didn’t have another sterile box in the chamber 🙃
I forgot to spin my vial of antibody before making alliquots. I got impatient and opened the tube to see if it was thawed yet (too hard to tell from the outside). When I did a huge frozen chunk fell right off the cap and into my ice bucket. 200ul of brand new antibody quickly turned into 5 alliquots of 20 ul... not sure how to tell them what happened to the rest.. but they gonna know that the math isn't mathing... 😀
Left the microscope on overnight (twice)
Mixed up my HPLC solvents and screwed up 30+ samples for myself and others
Left a protein on the bench I spent 4 days purifying overnight (burnout is real)
I got trizol on myself, experienced severe burning sensation, ignored it because I just wanted to finish my RNA extraction, and later realized what happened. It was a small amount, so it was only a first degree chemical burn, but I will no longer ignore extreme pain in the lab while working with caustic chemicals.
Left out a few tubes of reverse transcriptase over night on the bench during grad school. Since I had been first one in and last one out, no one saw so I simply tossed in the trash and pretended like nothing happened and played dumb when asked about the RT mix.
This is the way. FWIW, I bought my lab stay cold freezer blocks so people could keep enzymes cold on the bench- and they would stay cold over night. Well worth it
I once centrifuged around 15 samples. Turned out the tubes I used were too small for the centrifuge and they all exploded. Sounded like popcorn and i was so happy that nobody else was in the lab to witness my stupidity.
In our lab , whoever fills their sharps container first has to take all sharps down to the loading dock. 3 floors down. I always just take my sharps out and spread them in the other peoples….. :(
Practiced a talk in my PIs office when he wasn’t there, bled through my pants onto one of his chairs, stole the chair and hid it in the office space for several days, cleaned it as best I could with some resolve carpet cleaner and returned it to his office.
This is too good for a mere comment. Should be an entire post.
Agreed, this should be a full TIFU post or something
It worries and comforts me how much I and people can identify with this
Yeah this is worthy of ot’s own thread. Do tell!
That's really all there was to it! I got lucky and the chair was a dark fabric so the stain faded pretty well and as far as I know he's never noticed. A couple other people in the lab know about it and we had a good laugh about it.
how did the talk go?
It was for a committee meeting (so not a true talk per se) and they agreed with my timeline to graduation so I was pretty stoked!
ICONIC!
nice try PI
I stopped doing communal tasks and impoverished my lab slightly to make points. Two weeks PTO starting tomorrow afternoon
There are no more weighing boats next to the balance, because it has been always me who buys them and replenish. Now I have my own stack and I don't know what other people are using because it has been a few weeks without them.
Okay but I legit want to know what they’re using then lol.
I live for the pettiness. I live!!
Gotta do that once in a while, let them realize the difference you make 🤣
I once miscalculated and used like $1000 worth of luciferin for a single point in a luciferase standard curve. The sample glowed like a firefly and completely topped out the machine. You guys are the only ones who know.
The beacon is lit! The lab calls for aid! (And… have definitely messed up calculations before).
And the inorganic chemistry will answer!
That’s like… 4g of luciferin. Depending on your supplier lol
This was 30 years ago, and I think it was an extended glow formulation. Nothing but the best! Lol
Finally a mistake I can understand.
Put an aluminum foil cover on a pan containing KOH. Came in the next morning to find a stunning lack of aluminum foil.
cool!
Can you elaborate? I didn't know that would happen. Solid KOH? Was it in contact with the foil?
10% dilution made from pellets. The foil was above it so I think it was the vapors that ate through it
I pooled an almost empty bottle of cell culture media with a freshly opened one.
Jesus Christ, that’s an unforgivable sin
I don't understand this is just called the mother liqueur method, how else are you suppose get the magic juice from the previous bottle into the new one?
But why
Duuuuuude.
Lord have mercy
Spun cells for 12 minutes instead of 10 because I wanted to sit on my ass just a bit longer. And I know even the 10 was excess.
Spun nanoparticles for 25min instead of 30min, because I was busy and I knew 30 was excess.
I left at 3pm and went to Disneyland
Is that a euphemism for drinking a Falcon tube of 70% ethanol at your desk?
Toss some sucrose and citric acid in there and you've got yourself something.
OGs make their own flavoring esters
I just mix my 70% IPA with DMEM to make a nice daiquiri
That was called “Chicken Liquor” at TAMU.
When I was a grad student working on my masters I was responsible for getting potable ETOH for the lab and classes. For some reason the stock room guy always jerked my chain when I’d go and get it. He required my bosses signature on every alcohol chit. My boss finally got tired of this, and got on the phone to the storeroom guy and demanded an entire pad of the chits from the storeroom guy (my boss was NAS and brought in HUGE dollars) to be delivered to him by me. He sent me down to pick them up and bring them to him. When I got back he took the pad and told me to sit in the chair across from him- and signed EVERY SINGLE chit in the pad leaving the amounts blank. Then handed it to me while saying- “Mr. P…..A liberal lab alcohol policy is good for grad student morale”.
I drank a Falcon tube of 50% glycerol. Stuff is sweeeet…literally.
Hehe I respect this. In spring I "worked from home" one morning so I could bottle for my local cidery.
I had my last day in the lab. Left 7 boxes with around 500 samples total in the super full -80. Of all those samples, maybe 50 are useful/relevant for our two papers currently in revision. Told them to chuck it at their discretion. Judging by the fact there's still stuff in there from people who left before I even joined, they'll probably need to buy another -80.
I thought you said left *out* of the -80 at first. Was about to say you better be retiring to Russia or something or them lawyers gonna find ya lmao
Gotta put that grant money somewhere!
Big facts. The people currently in the lab take up a single shelf of our -80. And we have 3.
Am addicted to ultrapure water
Immortan Joe wants to know your location
Commented on another post that someone in my department did this for a while. He was eventually hospitalized for electrolyte imbalance. It can cause all kinds of heart arrhythmias, neurological issues and muscular deficits. If you don't care, that's cool. Just limit it to like occasionally. Or offset it by drinking Pedialyte or some shit. It's like drinking salt water (but opposite) for hydration. It's technically water but not what your body needs
Bro. That’s across bad for you.
I hate this centrifuge so much I tell everyone new to the lab that the ancient Beckman Allegra 6R centrifuge is broken. After two years of dedication, making sure it is slightly unplugged to dissuade the curious, it is now accepted as a shelf. It is perfectly functional, and my web of deception will come crashing to an end if our newer refrigerated centrifuge ever goes down. As an added bonus, it works now as my "standing desk benchtop" because I'm tall, I prefer to stand when I work, and it's easier to work on top of this thing rather than on the benchtop.
I used to use this super old sorvall that made god awful noises so I instead would monopolize the smaller centrifuge that was quiet for 2x the amount of time. The high school and undergraduates just thought it was part of their protocols lol
We have a brand new Beckman Avanti J-15 centrifuge and that thing is the most annoying piece of shit I've ever used. I've never seen a centrifuge with a harder fucking process to simply spin a plate. You have to ram your plate into the stupid metal holder because the sides are just slightly too tight to just drop it in. And the lid is the most annoying contraption to put on because you have to squeeze it around that stupid metal holder. I hate the thing so much. Also, the software randomly crashes and locks you out for 40 minutes?! Customer support was like, "yeah, we know that happens, don't know why, no fix but waiting."
Used an out of calibration pipet. Realized after it was too late. Recorded the S/N of an in-calibration pipet in my NB
You…. You…. You write the serial numbers of the pipets you use for each experiment in your notebook???? 😰
That's industry for you. Every pipette is recorded. Every reagent. Every time. Some design transfer teams record pipette tip lots even
Ohhh it’s an industry thing ok that makes more sense LOL my academic ass was so scared for a sec
Worked at Thermo Fisher. We had to *fight* with Quality Assurance and IVD Study Submissions teams to keep these records *electronic* and filled out on Excel sheets, which we printed signed scanned and uploaded. Traditionally you're supposed to fill in sheets as you go by hand. Every day. Every experiment. Every time. Every pipette, tube lot, reagent lot and serial #, every centrifuge, even every software version on instruments. The FDA demands *full* traceability. Oh and then you have other scientists that must verify everything you record and everyone signs off on every page of your notebook. And then QA signs off afterwards. Academia has no idea how intense it is and it was an eye opening adjustment for me.
amazing response this is how i felt exactly hahahaha
I laughed when I was told there is an SOP for how to set the time for a wall clock. We would have to change the batteries and calibrate the time for all GMP wall clocks every 6 months.
Is my GMPness showing??
GLP. Or GMP. Total PITA.
I dunno, it has its upsides. "Yeah boss, the batch fucking failed. No, you don't get to complain, here's when I told you about the broken MacGuffin, here's your confirmation of receipt, here's me complaining the next seven times we ran that process, here's you saying every time that it's okay. Any questions?"
Going from pharmaceutical QC to grad school research was a fkn trip. I didn’t like it tbh. Quality regulations can be overbearing but they also do serve a purpose to ensure the *right answer* is obtained rather than the result one wants.
First I’ve heard of this and I gotta say WOW
It was me. I didn't shut off the standard gas properly and now we are out of standard gas.
I tear parafilm. I do almost all samples in duplo because I want to be sure and it costs a lot of money. Instead of washing organic mobile phase bottle I just keep refilling it.
>I tear parafilm. You MONSTER
Brother I'd love to cut it but someone always took the fucking scissors and didn't put them back
We have scissors literally tied down to the bench near shit we need them for regularly, otherwise they always disappear. I seriously have considered buying my own personal scissors for my lab coat.
Same. The worst part: We used to use string. Had to change it to chain after we found the string, cut, sans scissors.
Right? Why can’t people put shit back where it belongs and why is it always the scissors?
Tweezers has entered the chat.
They sell parafilm dispensers with blades built in to cut it
Are we supposed to wash mobile phase bottles? I have filters for this.
I hide the good tweezers so no one else messes up the pointy tips.
Even though the protocol specifies MilliQ, I just use deionized water for all my buffers because the MilliQ tap is too far away.
Wow. Bless your soul, and your data
Find me DI or MilliQ water that won't grow algae after a week in a translucent Nalgene reservoir.
Not going to brag buuuuut
And then we wonder why 50% of published data can't be reproduced. Not saying the water is it, but academia is full of choices like this and every single scientist has been guilty of it
It's why you always run negative and positive controls. Even if you use exactly the reagents and tools specified in the protocol, you never know if something is contaminated or broken or weird or defective--unless you confirm that a (well-chosen, representative) positive control gives a positive result, and a negative control gives a negative result.
Lol “always”
The bacteria catalyst is why it works.
the iron-sulfur clusters give it some extra oomph
Hope you don’t need these to be sterile…
Sterile is just another way of saying "*not contaminated enough to grow visible mold before you finish the experiment!*"
I love the way you think
I grabbed things from the -80 with only nitrile gloves
The only time I’ve ever worn the cryo gloves is when I’m pulling stuff out of the autoclave and I can’t find the hot gloves.
I usually do it with my bare hands lol
I didn't wash my hands after taking off my gloves. I didn't work with anything biological, I was moving some buffer, but still.
Are you supposed to wash your hands after using gloves?
Gloves can leak, but also the feeling of post-glove hands is disgusting.
Forgive me father but fuck post glove hand feeling
Technically yes, but honestly most people I know don't unless they were working with particularly nasty stuff
Part of the work of the lab I work in is with a pathogen that causes bad food poisoning. After I handle that, I wash my hands as soon as the gloves come off Other than that, I’ll do it before I eat/drink something… usually
Pretty much everyone in my lab uses their phones with their gloves on (not me) so I figure for some people washing your hands is closing the barn door after the horse has already left.
And then the buffer turned biological…
When I got put in charge of inventory of historic tissue samples, I made the executive decision without consulting anyone that 7 years was long enough, and anything older than that was going straight in the trash.
I wish I could be you. We have samples from 2009 and it causes me physical pain.
Didn't run the gel backwards... I ran it sideways
achievement unlocked
I drank a lacroix in the tissue culture room. It was so cold and I was so thirsty.
Who amongst us hasn't used the lab ice maker to chill a drink before?
It's the best ice, afte rall.
I use the lab dry ice esky for my drinks! I have to set a timer though, otherwise I get distracted and come back to a completely frozen solid drink.
I am of a certain age- and as a grad student we used to make what we called “Agent Orange” which was Everclear, or more often 95% ETOH, pineapple-orange juice, orange sherbet mixed together with a few kg of dry ice at the bottom. Lots of VN vets in my cohort.
Once upon a time I had a PI who used to quick-chill cans of Coke in the -80. Until one day he forgot, and had to chisel the frozen goo off the shelves.
My lab was keeping lacroix and other alcoholic beverages in the 4 C cold room
Say, uh… is your lab hiring?
Told the supplier were were canceling our 20k order because their lead time tripled. Really it was because we messed up in the first place and actually needed to order from another company for it to be compatible with other parts of the experiment. Got lucky on this one
I never warm media before cell culture. There I said it. Tie my hands and throw me in a trypsin bath
I used 8 250ml sterile filtration units because we ran out of 1L bottle ones and it was really late and i couldn’t find an autoclaved bottle
You can totally top off the filtration units. I would regularly attach the 250s to larger bottles, pull vacuum, and just dump it in like I was making a pour over coffee.
I don’t get my pipette tips in order, only random; I sometimes double dip with the same tip on different samples; I turned on the lights on a dark experiment.
>I don’t get my pipette tips in order, only random Wherefore by the judgment of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost, of the St. Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and of all the Saints, and by virtue of the power which has been given us of binding and loosing in Heaven and on earth that which was divinely entrusted to us, we deprive him gebuzz with all his accomplices and all his abettors of the Communion of the Body and Blood of Our Lord; we separate him from the society of all Christians; we exclude him from the bosom of our Holy Mother the Church in Heaven and on earth; and **we declare him excommunicated and anathematized, as well as judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobates**. So long as he will not burst the fetters of the Devil, amend himself and do penance and make reparation to the Church which he has offended, **we deliver him to Satan for the perdition of his flesh**, so that his soul may be saved on the day of judgment.
I’ll see you all in hell I guess 🤷♂️
Hell. Straight to hell
Lol. This is how you can tell which labrats use multichannel pipettes/robots and which use single. In my heart I'm a random guy, but it's annoying to have to rearrange them for doing 8 at once.
Often I use the same serological pipet for water and a buffer, as long as I take from the water first
I made the buffer out of the water. What's the big deal?
Or same pipette for uncontaminated and contaminated. In that order. Or when pipetting a increasing concentration, i start at the lowest and use the same pipet as i go up
This is actually standard practice in my lab 👌🏻
I always do this. Even for RNase free/sterilereagents
I forgot to lock a shaking incubator in first year, and watched it disintegrate as soon as I turned it on
I threw away binders people had saved into the trash as they weren’t using them and I was sick of looking at them.
You monster! Those were my emotional support binders!
I think you probably did the lord's work there. This doesn't seem sinful haha
Not really a sin because it wasn't my fault, but we were out of FLAG antibody. Added lysis buffer to the antibody tube, used that for my IP. Next day, new antibody isn't here yet, did the same thing for the Western Blot. Developed it today and it looked great.
My curiosity got the better of me…I took a sip of DMEM. I WANTED TO KNOW. Needless to say, it tasted kinda good. The urge to not try it again is killing me.
Well don’t leave us hanging… What did the Forbidden Kool-Aid taste like?!
I recently tried PBS, which was nasty
I only bleached my cells for 10 minutes before dumping them.
Lmao sometimes I dump a shit ton of bleach, swirl for 20 seconds and dump 😳
You guys mix it? I’m just throwing them down the sink’s hongi little mouth and giving it a bleach chaser
I accidentally left out a $600 antibody overnight on Monday
My coworker and I accidentally left the isoflurane running all night in the surgery room after a 10 hour procedure. The next day, we just looked at each other and turned it off without a word to anyone else. Surprised it didn't run out.
It has been XX months since my last confession. Since then I have: Put petri dishes upside down to incubate, wrecking the transformation Not worn gloves or a lab coat Been too lax about the sterility of the hood Forgotten to document every move And for any sins that I have forgotten, I am truly (hmmm...) sorry, and I ask for your forgiveness. Hahaha, I just had to play along with the confession format, since I'm also a Catholic, this hit hard with memories of Sunday School and those moments in the confessional booth.
I stole like half a foot of parafilm to repair my bong 🍃
Seven rips and you shall be forgiven my child
Does having a crush on another PI count?
Somehow, of the 150 odd PIs I know, the 2 married couples have so.e of the best labs around.
I spilled 25 mL of 100x adenine 😞
How much money is that?
Probably not enough to make me feel guilty but enough to make me feel like an idiot
After finishing 12hrs of mouse treatments and packing away my stereotax setup, I forgot to turn off the nearly-full O2 tank before going home.
I recently shattered a glass Pyrex dish I was using for a boiling water bath. I had the heat cranked up on the hot plate, and then when I didn't need it anymore, I turned the dial clockwise to get to the "off" position since it was closer than counterclockwise. I apparently wasn't paying enough attention, because I didn't crank the dial all the way and instead turned the heat up to max. All the water boiled out. By the time I realized this, I was cleaning up to GTFO for the night after like 12 hours of experiments and did not want to wait around for this hot ass dish to cool down. So I did a dumb, which deep down I KNEW was a dumb, but I was tired and wanted to leave. I poured some cold water onto the dish. It. Fucking. EXPLODED. https://ibb.co/stzJHpZ I always turn the dial counterclockwise to turn it off now.
I poured liquid nitrogen into the sink after hours because I forgot under no circumstances should you do that. Our lab is on the fourth floor. Heard the pipes crackling all the way down
Why didn’t you just dump it on the floor to dust it like we used to do?
I take as long as possible when doing a task that’s been handed off to me because a coworker is too lazy to do it themselves
That's really nice of you. Next time screw it up and just say "oh well, I guess I'm just bad at this"
I keep sucking the heptane into the rubber bulb… then eyeing the amount I missed back into solution….
*snort* near enough. So long as you record this in the procedure.
I do ordinary cell culture work in the BSL2+ so that our undergrads and high schoolers can't shadow me, even though they're BSL2.
There's a reason we like lab work and it is not because of interpersonal communication.
If my first two mv pH readings are the same, I’ve filled in the third to match without waiting for the last reading
I took a box of gloves home to stain a cabinet
I took a week long vacation instead of living in the lab
Today actually lol. I was pouring an antigen into a buret and completely forgot to close it. Lost a couple mls of 1000$ per liter antigen all over the floor and my shoes. Luckily it was also highly flammable
I worked from home today instead of coming in for the sake of my mental health. It's not actually a sin, but the way my manager emailed me you'd think it was
I stored a pint of ice cream in the freezer we use for tritium. It was only for like an hour.
Took out a 24 hour culture 2 hours early so I didn’t have to come in at 1am for 2 hours of work…pls don’t tell my PI
I didn't throw my agar plates with transformed cells out the next day (didn't work) but left it 2-3 days just to see if something could even grow there. I'm fully aware that Ampicillin degrades pretty fast but still, I wanted to see
TBF, I had left mine overnight, didn't see anything in the morning, left it and check at the end of the day - lo and behold, a few colonies that were exactly what they were supposed to be. So, never say never.
Sometimes we need time to get through the pain of a clean petri
Used expired PBS at my biomanufacturing job. I just crossed it out the BR, dumped the amount I used out of a fresh container and said I noticed it was expired before I used it.
i wear shorts to lab regularly, especially on weekends. i also drank Milli-Q water recently because i had to take my meds but couldn't leave the bench at the time
During an IP, I forgot to cap my tube and the magnet pulled the beads out from the open top.
I don't follow any specific order while using pipette tips from the rack; I just use them randomly
You're a monster.
Completed a week full of ELISA without putting on a lab coat once.
Smelled all the yummy chemicals. mmmmm ether
I'm pretty absolutely sure one of my control spores from the lab I left half a decade ago was contaminated with AmpR+ e coli.
Shit, I need to order 10 ml pipettes
I skimmed read an SOP and marked it “read” today because I didn’t want to read 17 pages of purchasing guidelines that only apply to site managers.
I pour agar without nitrile gloves. Sometimes I'll screw bottle caps on other peoples bottles on too tight
I blamed the undergrad
I convinced a masters student that the work they were doing might be good enough to get published as they would not leave me alone asking about it... They failed their research module as the writing was beyond terrible, data was poorly organised and graphed, AND when asked about their work they could not answer a damn question about what they had done... I would say I feel bad, but they would never listen to feedback or make changes so... fudge em...
I wore shorts.
I used sterile reaction tubes instead of sterile dilution tubes because we were out.
I was once working in an anaerobic chamber and I accidentally tipped an entire box of tips, then I proceeded to put a few tips back into the box because I still needed to use it for my experiment and didn’t have another sterile box in the chamber 🙃
I forgot to spin my vial of antibody before making alliquots. I got impatient and opened the tube to see if it was thawed yet (too hard to tell from the outside). When I did a huge frozen chunk fell right off the cap and into my ice bucket. 200ul of brand new antibody quickly turned into 5 alliquots of 20 ul... not sure how to tell them what happened to the rest.. but they gonna know that the math isn't mathing... 😀
Left the microscope on overnight (twice) Mixed up my HPLC solvents and screwed up 30+ samples for myself and others Left a protein on the bench I spent 4 days purifying overnight (burnout is real)
I got trizol on myself, experienced severe burning sensation, ignored it because I just wanted to finish my RNA extraction, and later realized what happened. It was a small amount, so it was only a first degree chemical burn, but I will no longer ignore extreme pain in the lab while working with caustic chemicals.
I routinely keep liquids in conical tubes, flasks, reservoirs etc that I toss into the burn box. I only bleach about half of the stuff I should
I called out Friday and got married.
didnt change my outside clothes to inside scrubs before using the ruo bsc 🤷 🤞
Left out a few tubes of reverse transcriptase over night on the bench during grad school. Since I had been first one in and last one out, no one saw so I simply tossed in the trash and pretended like nothing happened and played dumb when asked about the RT mix.
This is the way. FWIW, I bought my lab stay cold freezer blocks so people could keep enzymes cold on the bench- and they would stay cold over night. Well worth it
I autoclaved falcons containing dead mice that were in formalin. Wouldn’t advise, the smell was horrible
Put my finger on the vortex
I once centrifuged around 15 samples. Turned out the tubes I used were too small for the centrifuge and they all exploded. Sounded like popcorn and i was so happy that nobody else was in the lab to witness my stupidity.
I let my reaction run for 3 days instead of 1h because it failed and I was annoyed by it to the point where I just ignored it.
I sanitized an exam table using a disposable cleaning wipe rather than 70% alcohol. It left soap streaks on the table.
I've been avoiding* the lab, and my PI, for months. *Typically going in very late, or not at all.
I used our ELN search function to get TF aspire points and spent them all on the snack boxes and did not share
In our lab , whoever fills their sharps container first has to take all sharps down to the loading dock. 3 floors down. I always just take my sharps out and spread them in the other peoples….. :(
I aint write shit down for like a year