Every time I walk by, I feel guilty and look the other way. Not that this helps: I can somehow detect that my neglect is noticed, even when I deliberately take a different route to avoid detection. I can almost sense the wistful disappointment pressing against the back of my head as I carry on down the corridor, the silent pleading for me to turn around. Just once. Just for a little while.
I have not done any serious lab work for nearly three weeks, and my empty bench is breaking my heart. There is a glass partition between the lab and the hallway to my office, you see, and my bench in the closest one to the window. I can see it all there, waiting: my four Gilsons, ranked in order from p1000 to p2; my beakers of sterilized Eppendorf tubes, my stacked boxes of tips. My lucky forceps and my ravishingly beautiful platinum loop. My row of solutions, gently aging now to a fine vintage, their nominal pH gradually decaying into poetic license. My microfuge, my vortex mixer; the long grabby nameless contraption I use to fish out tubes from the liquid nitrogen tank. Timer, pens, calculator. Boxes of fresh polished microscope slides and coverslips; the crusty old plastic lids I use over and over to wash filters. The stained white coat, shapeless and discarded over the back of my stool.
Of course what I am doing instead of benchwork is also called science. I have been finalizing a co-authored paper for publication, fiddling with text and an evil Adobe product that shall remain nameless. I have been processing images for another co-author which involves doing the same unspeakably boring series of commands on ImageJ over and over and over for hours on end. (Note to self: learn how to do macros. Further note to self: freeing up enough time to learn how to do macros will require setting up some macros: entire chain of logic explodes.) I have been dreaming in the dark confocal room as the microscopic eye slices through my fixed cells with glacial slowness and I twiddle dials to alter false-color pixels of gain and offset. And I have been watching timelapse movies of my cells seething across the screen, throwing up blobs and speckles of actin in bizarre configurations. Soon, I will have to start finalizing my screen annotation for publication, which will weld me to a spreadsheet for a good few weeks.
But in the wings, I have a new gene that is begging to be understood better. I have made wonderful tools that need to be played with, and I have an intriguing hypothesis that I would like to test. But I need to finish what I’ve started, tie up loose ends and clear the decks before I can dive back in.
So for now, I sit at my desk with a cup of bad coffee and try to ignore the singing. Maybe someone should lash me to the mast.
The stained white coat, shapeless and discarded over the back of my stool.
Before you dive back in, wash your labcoat. Seriously. There’s nothing quite so new beginnish as a clean labcoat.
Might be time for a whole new coat, in that case. Those stains are not going anywhere.
Have you got one of those polycotton things? Bleach & 95°C is always good… anyway slight, fading stains add a cetain touch of class, I feel.
We’ve got no control over the lab laundry! And I feel too squeamish about running it through the machine at home – all those genetically modified whoozits, don’t you know.
Boil the suckers.
You have your own personal grabby nameless contraption? So jealous…
‘In which I pine’? Surely not. As you said yourself, MDF is luckier.
I always preferred elm, but I don’t want to take a geeky turn as well as perpetuate bad puns.
Eva, every lab should have a number of grabby nameless contraptions. Personal ones are usually hidden away in a drawer, labelled with Sharpie and white insulation tape/autoclave tape. Woe betide anyone who misappropriates a personal grabby nameless contraption.
In fact, securing a supply of grabby nameless contraptions
iswas usually my first action in a new lab.We certainly do fight over forceps in our lab. You need a pair of ultra-fine, deadly pointy and every-so-slightly curved ones (sort of the polar opposite of the grabby nameless contraption) to manipulate cover slips in liquid without breaking them, and for some reason there are never enough of them.
Meanwhile, Henry, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree.
I never fought over forceps. I secured a supply and kept them well hidden. The deadly sharp and slightly curved ones, as you say, and those flat-bladed Millipore ones for blots.
It’s plane to me that Henry should leaf this one alone.
Or spruce up his puns ac-cord-ingly.
I’m rooting for him.
(You know, I thought long and hard (um…) about posting that, because I know what that means in Strine, and my Antipodean reader has just fallen off his chair).
I just remembered that in my PhD lab we had a nitrogen grabber that was three foot long with a three-pronged pincer mechanism at the end that you operated from the handle, much like those things at fun-fairs that you use to grasp prizes from inside a glass bubble. We used these because our Kenyan collaborators used to send us HIV-infected sample vials loose inside panty-hose inside the tanks, and the hose always developed runs and we’d have to chase vials blind around the bottoms of the steaming tanks.
And who ever said that science was boring?
I hope these jokes don’t become too poplar.
Else I’ll have to ash you all to stop.
Fir goodness’ sake.
I’m just astonished that after three weeks alone, your ravishingly beautiful platinum loop, nicely-arranged Gilsons and tidily autoclaved tubes haven’t gone missing. Doesn’t anyone else in your lab do any work?
Willow you all stop the puns, please? Beech reasonable, now.
You have to remember that half of the lab are fly jockeys, so they do their dirty work with weird things like paintbrushes. The rest of us are currently welded to our computers, cursing every time ImageJ crashes. There is something analytical in the air these days.
Are you telling us that fly jockeys don’t ever pipette things?
Nah, it’s all slicing, dicing, enforced matings and general torture.
And inventing stupid names for genes.
I actually went through a similar feeling back when I was stuck doing microarray analysis and general genomic wrangling some time — oh gosh, two years ago now. The first time I got back into the lab afterwards I felt like a PI, for all the wrong reasons. Which are blogged somewhere in Australia but I can’t find them right now.
Oak-kay, I understand now.
What acorny pun.
Thank yew.
I want a word in privet.
(Jenny, please cedar it that they stop the puns. Oh, wait.)
You can’t stop us, Richard G. and I are larch enemies.
That’s not ent-irely true.
an evil Adobe product that shall remain nameless Hmm, you have me guessing there, Jenny.
Looking forward to an ice-cold pint of cedar, later.
Wooden you know it – I missed all the best ones.
an evil Adobe product that shall remain nameless
Would that be the same one that insists on stealing great chunks of RAM and refuses to give them back once it is exited?
Nature Networkers: eu can’t lypt us get started with the puns. Much butternut, by gum.
Some call the copse, please.
‘Someone’, obviously.
an evil Adobe product that shall remain nameless
It’s bloated, it’s clunky, it won’t let you save as a jpg or tif and when you print out something that looks beautiful on screen, it just goes all black and murky.
Once more into the beech, dear friends.
it won’t let you save as a jpg or tif
Ah, not Photoshop then, which is the one to which I was alluding.
“copse” – snigger. Well done. This is all beginning to spinney out of control, isn’t it?
I can’t see the forest for the trees.
No, I haven’t worked out this pun thing, have I?
No, Richard, you just haven’t twigged yet.
I need to branch out, obviously. I hope you’re all rooting for me.
you could always go out on a limb…
Is it time to leaf this thread alone yet? It all seems so needle-less.
Cant you do both together..a bit of writing and a bit of experimenting? Or in this case a lot of writing and a bit of experimenting.
Daniel, it’s a sensible suggestion, but the things I do at the bench tend to suck up a lot of time, so between that and the meetings I have to attend, I wouldn’t have enough time to slay the writing/analysis tasks that I really need to get out of the way. The experimenting is so much time that it tends to have its way with me.
I used to find that mixing and matching papers and experiments really didn’t work, my previous post about multitasking notwithstanding.