Issue Fifteen, this fourteenth day of July, 2003
'You won't get anyone stupider than me'
That's it. I've had enough. I'm going to find an RPG-7 and down his plane as it flies back tomorrow morning. There's nothing that destroys the beauty of a day off as knowing that Sauron has been in the States for three days and will be even crazier on his return.
It's high time he came out of that lab-coat, anyway. Everything we do has to be centralized, standardized, monopolized, regimentalized and fucked up. 'Let's centralize our reagents'. Tris is central, the chemicals on the shelves are central, the enzymes are central, what more does he want? Oh that's right, he's anally retentive and can't bear the thought that I might have a private, special stock of DTT, or water, or a hundred and one buffers which are for my crystals, mine do you hear? MINE. I gave in over the same password for each computer issue. I'm just trying to work out a way of turning it to my advantage.
Hey, I know! Let's do everything at the same time each week so we know what each other is doing, we should have a fixed timetable for protein preps because let's face it, if you're doing a protein prep it takes exactly 2.5 days and you can't do anything else at the same time, and by doing it his way we'll be forced to use gravity flow columns! What a step forward for science! And instead of using these elegant and efficient concentrator columns, to concentrate the protein we've just spent months trying to get soluble let's use ammonium sulphate precipitation! Now why didn't I think of using this 'very powerful technique'? He's talking about doing something (I don't remember what at this distance, my id has mercifully blanked that bit) to bug samples for running on gels, you know, something that will take three times as long . . . because 'most people's gels don't look that great.' No, your gels don't look that great. Mine are fine. And don't get me started on washing out IPTG ('which we can't do with pMW because we don't use IPTG'). My God, I think he's finally lost it.
Bear with me, it gets worse. In the lab meeting he's having his perennial rant about doing things in parallel, interleaving experiments, the usual shite we do anyway, and how it would be a really good idea if we cloned every new ORF into five or six different vectors simultaneously because that way we'll find the expression/solubility sweet spot sooner (my phraseology; his took about half an hour) and then, straight afterwards, he tells Doctor Medic not to start cloning his construct into other vectors but to see if what he had worked first.
Mental emails
I need to do a single electro-blotting for an N-terminal sequencing. I am waiting for my order of 25X Novex Buffer. In the meantime could anyone please spare [...] some Novex buffer?
Uh huh. We make it up ourselves in this lab, sonny Jim. It's hardly difficult, or time-consuming.
Our favourite RPO has put spill kits around the building.
Chemical spill kit contains the following.
Use the white bucket to remove chemically contaminated material to the
chemical waste store.
2 BOOMS
3 Absorbent MATS
2 MARIGOLD GLOVES
2 Plastic aprons
1 Safety spectacles
1 bag of RESTRICTED AREA tape
1 Time tape
1 MIDI GRIP bags LARGEST to contain radioactive spill kit.
Two booms? Eh? Surely we're trying to stop the explosions here? Is that what the 'Time tape' is for, a delayed fuse? <boggle>
Lab Rats
My very young apprentice's problem is that he doesn't have a clear function. Studmuffin has been showing the same gel four weeks on the trot now. Grasshopper is becoming more cynical by the day; the change is gratifying. Doctor Medic maintains good humour and shows every sign of enjoying coffee with Sauron. Give it time, give it time . . .
I'm sorry, I have to go and lie down in a darkened room. Failing that, a nice cup of tea and a sit down. Thanks, Little Richard.
Off to be decentralized,
Richard (- in a bottomless pit)