Recommended by DGT, part 3

I've been working with blood samples a lot since I started my new job. Working with blood is equally as annoying as working with radioactivity - the amount of safeguards required are disproportionate to the threat presented. I have found a couple new products to cope with these safeguards:

RedZ biohazard control powder (fisher/no vwr link). This stuff is frigging cool - it's a crystalline absorbent powder that turns liquid waste into solid waste. It absorbs the liquid (e.g., extra blood, contaminated buffers, etc) and expands massively, morphing it into a non-spillable blodge of fatter crystals. Our safety regulations indicate that no liquids can go into the biohazard trash, so this also comes in very handy for sopping up leftover wash buffer or whathaveyou. The funnest part is when you have different colored liquid wastes (let's say, blue-dyed ELISA reagent, red tissue culture media, and PBS) and can make a big fun pastiche with the RedZ. How often is biosafety fun?

Absorbent orange pads (fisher/no vwr again - WTF VWR?). They're called BloodBloc and they come in a whole mess of sizes. I use two - the 4x4" size are good for opening VacuTainer tubes without splatting blood everywhere, and the 14x16" size for laying down in the hood to catch any drips. They have a ever-so-slightly tacky orange plastic backing (and I mean "tacky" in the "adhesive-y" sense, not that "OMG I can't believe they picked that color" sense) that prevents liquid from passing through, and a very thick absorbent front side. Nothing comes through these things. They're awesome - like the pale blue bench pads on steroids.




Previously recommended by DGT
(Recommendation #1: KimberlyClark Sterling Nitrile gloves, fisher/vwr)
(Recommendation #2: Novagen KOD polymerase, fisher/vwr)

In which I realize who my readers really are

All the labs I've worked in have had tissue culture rooms. These rooms have been stocked with common reagents that everyone using the space would likely need (including tips, pipettes, plates, etc etc). These reagents have been set off to the side, in either a big wire shelf or in a series of nesting bins. I wager that everyone's tissue culture room looks pretty much the same.

If I'm culturing cells, and I use up the last of something from one of the bins, what do I do? First, I restock it from the bigger hoarde of lab supplies that exist somewhere else in lab. If that backup stock is out, I have either added it to the common order log, or I order it myself. Both actions take a very small amount of time, and they ensure that the reagents necessary for tissue culture will be there when I come back to use the room again.

Now, why this long preamble? Well, it would appear that I am in the vast, vast minority of scientists who comprehend this very difficult set of actions. I can't really say why it's so impossibly complicated, but perhaps I am just an exceptionally gifted individual and I have woefully underestimated how amazing my reordering skills are.

But let's extrapolate for a minute here: I would wager that the vast majority of people who read my blog are scientists - either currently or formerly. Based on my observed rate of restockers vs piggish-out-for-myself-ers, this math indicates that the vast majority of scientists reading my blog ARE THESE VERY SAME ASSHATS WHO CAN'T MANAGE TO LET ANYONE KNOW THEY USED UP THE LAST 96 WELL PLATE!

J'accuse!! Go ahead, defend your actions! (Of course, I also anticipate the same reaction here that I've always seen in labs - "Oh, no - it's not me. I always write 5mL pipettes on the order board.")

Levels of losing

It sucks to see the NFL belatedly admit that they missed calling roughing the passer on Bobby McCray for that disabling hit he put on Favre, and it super-sucks to hear that they're even fining McCray for it. If it was such a vicious hit, why didn't you throw the flag when it frigging happened?? On top of all of that, it super-duper sucks to see my favorite sports columnist put the Vikings as the #2 all time "Most Tortured Teams", coming in only behind the Cubbies.

Damn. I mean, I knew in my heart of hearts that it's true, but it stings a little differently when someone spells it out like that.

Percentages

I've had a lot (n=3) of people ask me what I do as a scientist in industry. At the risk of generalizing my experiences to all industry tech positions ('cause hey - that's what blogs are for), these are my approximations for my current position.

Meetings: 40% of my day. Meetings run the gamut from small (~6 people, making up my immediate group, where our group leader gives announcements & one or two people present a 5-slide update on their progress; it happens twice a month) to large (~150 people, from all departments across the site, where one to three group leaders present a 30-slide update on their group's progress; it happens once a week). I also have weekly meetings with my supervisor to go over what I've been doing over the week. There are meetings between biologists and chemists (where I painfully regret how poorly I did in organic chemistry in college) as well as just us biologists. There are stockroom committee meetings, tissue culture committee meetings, meetings with core facility directors, meetings with animal welfare committee people, meetings with outside contractors, etc etc. Toss in a few seminars and that's about 40%.

Reading stuff: 20% of my day. The meetings I attend bring up a lot of questions - did we think about the role of Y in X? Does protein Z play a role in this type of cells? I figure out what's known in the literature about these questions. I also get moved around a bit onto new projects, and need to do a lot of background reading on those projects.

Writing: 15% of my day. This subsumes writing email (getting things from people, setting up meetings, etc), putting together slide decks on the results of my work and my literature search, writing up the protocols for what I'm going to do at the bench, and formalizing those protocols to go into my official notebook

Working at the bench: 15% of my day. I don't spend a remarkable amount of time at the bench. Reason 1: the programs I'm working on are at a relatively late stage, and more chemistry is happening than biology. Reason 2: our group is relatively new in our floor, and a lot of the space isn't entirely outfitted for immediate use. Many people (myself included) have been trying to get the right equipment, the right consumables, and the right miscellaneous stuff into the rooms in order to make them functional. This takes time (and I've included it here).

"Other": 10% of my day. Hey - I'm not perfect.

Over a month?

Gee, you'd think I'd been doing something interesting.

Part of my quietness has come from knowing that I can't speak with as authoritatively on something I thought I could - namely, "what it's like to work in industry". See, when I was at Massive Pharma, it was the only industrial location I'd been at, and I had somehow convinced myself that how things worked there (and more specifically, how things worked in the department I was in) could be generalized across all pharma. Probably in my heart of hearts, I knew that wasn't the case, but that confidence in my own knowledge made me much more loquacious.

Now, my n has increased to two, and I can see how wrong my impressions of "industry" actually are. I feel less equipped to talk about what's going on. (I mentioned the beginnings of this sense of disconnectedness before.) Compounded on this was the feeling that I was flailing in my new position because it was so far afield from what I'm comfortable with and know well. I think like CE said, it's hard to want to talk about shit when you feel like it's all not working.

The good news is that I am finally starting to feel like I know what I'm doing in my new job. I've gotten a bunch of feedback from my supervisor, and some of the other PhDs that I work for, to tell me that I'm exceeding expectations. It's weird to get validation that you're doing a good job when you don't feel like you can possibly learn fast enough. I'm making my way through the jargon (I kind of startled myself when I started using the jargon like a normal language) and I think I'm making the right impressions on the people I need to impress. Phew. Getting through the woods is hard, but I think I'm coming out the other side.

Oh, XKCD...

...how brilliant you are:

You cannot stop this.

You can only hope to contain it.


Yeah, baby!! While I am terribly disappointed that the Vikings lost this week (in true Brett Favre fashion) and that Green Bay won, I will accept this victory on behalf of my picks.