Beyond the Drawbridge

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.

Thanks to the Black Knight for offering me a place to vent things that I’d rather not put on a blog with my name on it. Like this story about the FACS booking system…

During my time at my old lab, I used the hospital’s flow cytometry facility to sort my cells. When we (lab and facility) moved to a new building, the facility merged with that of another hospital, and they changed their booking system.

The old system worked like this:
I would pop over to the facility, and the tech would say:
-“Oh, hi, how have you been? Need to sort? That’s great. I have some time on Wednesday two weeks from now.”
-“Nah, Wednesday is no good for this, can I go on Thursday or Friday?”
-“Well, I can fit you in on Friday, but I’d have to start half an hour earlier. Is that okay?”
-“Sure, thanks! See you!”
And they would write the booking in by hand on a supplier-swag monthly wall calendar, and I’d plan my transfection for the day before my appointment, and everything just functioned.

The new system “worked” like this:
They switched from the wall calendar to an online booking system that was originally meant for something else entirely, and adapted that so it kind of works for booking time on their machines. Everyone who had been using the facility needed to attend a seminar in which they showed us how to use the system. (To be fair, that was a good idea, because nobody could ever have figured it out on their own!) At the training they told us, by way of motivational story, how people at CSHL or Johns Hopkins or some other fancy US institute had to line up at 2AM for their FACS sorting, and we should be glad that we got this new system, which was at least not as bad as lining up at 2AM.
It’s very, very close, though.
Read more »

Brunhilde is agog at some of the language in the latest HR newsletter:

SydneyRecruitment manages the end-to-end recruitment of staff and the on-boarding of new staff.

On-boarding sounds like the sort of thing young, fit babes might get up to at Bondi.

I’m afraid I never read those emails anymore. They’re full of such stuff. I retrieved this month’s copy from the trash and chose a few lines at random:

…cancellation of any sponsorship rights going forward.

SydneyPeople is divided into HR teams that work together to service all your HR needs

advice and guidance to [clients] on strategic and operational human resources issues impacting the University’s performance.

…proactive development of internal talent…

…ensures the principles of workforce diversity and EEO are embraced

..ensuring the University’s overall remuneration strategy meets the domestic and global
competition for talent.

I thought ‘meeting competition’ was a great concept, but I’m worried that I’ve been re-aligned:

With an effective date of 1 August 2008 the HR Service Centre will have re-aligned the support of the University’s groups/schools/units to different HRSC Team Members.

Do you think that might impact my performance to such an extent that I might need to proactively embrace internal talent development and be serviced by HR?

This is what you get when stuff is written by people from the Centre for the Mind. Seriously.

An email via my Nature Network profile:

sir ,
this is ranjit from india
a biotech student persuing b.tech
sir i want to know about carrier of a scientist
n sope of biotech in most developed countries n developing countries
i shall be very thankfull to u 4 this

um… Harvard?

Viking Biochemist writes:

Our lab meeting was invaded this morning by corporate zombies who wanted to show us our “new brand”. Our logo looks like a computer power switch but is supposed to be “a cheeky reminder of a copyright logo” which we then stick over every image in our ads.

Apparently we now own babies, butterflies, eggs, tablets and bees.

This is all so when our granny asks where we work, we don’t have to say
“It’s like the Garvan”, because of course that’s what we all did.

… and this is the place I will have on my CV for the rest of my life as
where I did my PhD. Maybe I should add a note:
I started at the Centenary before they turned evil

Fortunately, there is a good trashy action movie out today, so I can go
and sooth my soul with a giant mechatronic man smashing stuff for two hours.

This reminds me of a strange email that went to everyone on the University HR list a few days ago, the understanding of which yet eludes me:

In 2002 the University determined that dissemination of all text-based, third-party copyright materials required for student course work would be carried out by the Library. However, a decentralised approach was adopted in the case of images, diagrams and artistic works included in lecture presentations and lecture notes. It was agreed that these could be located on individual course web sites and on learning management systems.

The University is party to a new agreement with the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) which places greater emphasis on the monitoring process and in the future details of all images, diagrams and artistic works communicated to students under Part VB of the Copyright Act will have to be recorded during any monitoring of electronic copying and communication exercise.

It continues in that vein ad nauseam. And I am thoroughly sick of corporatization, wank, and arsepaperwork.

I have to complain about the way people use the lab stocks: When you use aliquots and there are not many Eppis left, please MAKE UP MORE!!!
Currently, there are 3 Eppendorfs of Amp left in the stock…

This is not the first time I open a rack to find it nearly empty and I am fed up with making up the stocks for other people.

Since there are a lot of people expressing stuff at the moment, you should make up more stocks when there are 10 Eppis left, also of the IPTG or whatever else you use.

Please be more considerate about others!

Guessing the nationality just isn’t fun any more.