Beyond the Drawbridge

Just because you’re DVC Research doesn’t give you the right to nick my chair EVERY TIME YOU TALK TO YOUR FUCKING USELESS POSTDOC.

This person is not particularly liked around the place. This

I just used [the gel-doc system] and the person before me had left a puddle of liquid on the glass base.  Judging from the photo taken I presume this liquid would have been contaminated with ethidium bromide.

This sort of mess left on common-use equipment shows a certain amount of laziness and disregard for colleagues, not to mention the potential damage to the instrument.

So whoever left the mess, get your act together and clean up after yourself.  If the box of tissues is empty, as it was when I used the instrument, go and get another box – like I had to.

None of this is all that difficult.

Bleh. Please.

A certain person used to complain at me for sending frivolous emails to the departmental mailing list: someone would make a request and I’d say something funny, or carry on a discussion for all to see because I thought they might be interested. I stopped doing it in response to the complaint: and now people stop me in the corridor and tell me they miss my emails.

So the departmental mailing list is a bit boring these days, although I do extract as much juice as I can for the labrats. But you’ll be pleased to know that the new gig is likely to provide endless entertainment too. This just in, sent to all 3-400 people at SN:

My plain burgundy cup has gone missing from my desk.
If you borrowed it, please return it.
I want my tea.

Normally, I try to restrain myself from expressing petty complaints about the behaviour of my colleagues, knowing as I well know that my own actions are most certainly not beyond reproach.  However, I find myself very much in the mood for a rant, having discovered yesterday – at a somewhat inopportune moment – that someone has stolen the cart for the autoclave, a cart so specialized in its design, that it can really serve no other purpose than assisting me in the removal of 8 litres of superheated liquid from said machine.  The occasion forced me to ponder the profoundly philosophical query, “What the Fuck?”

And since I am in a mood to relieve myself of annoyances by the time tested method of griping, and knowing as I do of the Black Knight’s affection for imprecise communication, I thought I might give vent to a peeve peculiar to my department.  The Department of Pharmacology is split between two buildings.  In the Blackburn Building, it occupies portions of the 2^nd (which is inexplicably located below ground level) and 3^rd floors.  In the adjacent Bosch Building, it occupies the 2^nd floor (which is indeed the second level of the building).  I reside on the 2^nd floor of the Blackburn Building, which by the by has an additional four levels above me containing all manner of useful resources (excluding, at present, the autoclave). 

For reasons unknown and beyond my imagining, everyone in the Blackburn Building refers to the portions of the department located in the Bosch Building as “upstairs”, rather than “next door”.   Thus when someone asks, “Are you going upstairs to autoclave your media?” and I reply in the affirmative, there has not been any reliable exchange of information.  This phenomenon has resulted in countless confused conversations regarding the locations of various items and personnel.

Granted, the 2^nd  level of the Bosch Building is technically located on a higher physical plane than the 2^nd level of the Blackburn Building, but calling it “upstairs” seems like a shockingly ambiguous description of its location.  I cannot help but imagine that the 3^rd floor occupants of the Blackburn Building must feel marginalized in some small way by this tradition.  No one has been able to offer any consolation by way of an explanation, resorting instead to the frequently echoed excuse “that is just the way it has always been done” – a phrase so freely tossed about that it could fuel an entire rant of its own.

Fortunately, my hostile emotions are now dissipated, thus I shall retreat to my 2^nd floor dungeon to perform some outdated task while I wait for the autoclave to cool down.

So there we were, having fruit instead of cake (Mrs JM thinks we eat too much cake and we should all go on diets) because Thu was going on maternity leave. Boris is peeling lychees and trying to figure out which bits you eat, and which you don’t.

“If you swallow the seed,” says Thu with a smile, “it grows into a tree inside you.”

“Oh,” says Boris, “Then what did you swallow?”

I nearly choked on my char masala and had to be excused.

M’very good friend, let’s call her Brunhilde, was having trouble with senescence last week.

More specifically, her cells were sick, and there were black lumpy bits in the media. So I gave her some of my cells, and after a few days they started to have black lumpy bits, too. I suggested she changed serum supplier, and gave her some more of my babies (although, in her own words her recent record suggests DOCS should be called). As Brunhilde was not around when I split them, I secreted a fully labelled flask in the incubator in the IC lab cell culture room.

You know when you’ve done something wrong, don’t you?

Apparently there was mass hysteria in the IC lab at this strange flask that was, to hear it, oozing bugs and viruses and mycoplasma everywhere (let’s forget that, all modesty aside, I probably have the best aseptic technique in the building). I didn’t know this at the time; it wasn’t until I caught up with Brunhilde and DH that the full story unfolded.

Turns out that our very own aggressive-passive-aggressive emailer, Mr Kidd, was the one getting upset. But that’s OK, we said; he’s German. And a very German German at that. Thence the conversation deteriorated somewhat. We talked about How Strange the Dutch Are (and Especially the Southern Dutch), about Belgium (how it exists purely as somewhere for Europe to fight its wars), various theories about second generation immigrants to Australia (look, just don’t ask, OK?) and back to Germans. I told the joke (second time around I got it right) about Germans and debating societies and wars, and how I had persuaded one particular student in Cambridge to stop telling me how they used to do it in Germany.

We all agreed that while individual Germans can be very personable, they do have a peculiar tendency to, ah, organize things. Especially when multiple.

And then DH said,

“How on earth did they ever manage to lose the war?”

Laugh? I nearly bought a round.