Let's kick off with a good old favourite - and one with a twist, at that! I "looked after" three main labs and two small ones. The one I spent most of my time in had a washing room in the centre. This is where people brought used glassware and plasticware to me for washing and autoclaving (sterilising in a giant pressure cooker-type device).
They also bought used-up pipette tip boxes here. These were small plastic tips, used to suck up a small quantity of liquid just once, then discarded. This prevented cross-contamination of samples. Anyway, as they got through hundreds per day, I regularly had to refill boxes. Some of the boxes were refilled one-by-one, while others had "clip-in" racks of tips. The old empty racks were returned to the manufacturers for re-use. Still others had throw-away "sheets" of tips.
Of course scientists at one of Britain's top seats of learning and research are able to keep track of having to do three different things with three different colours of object, right? If it's purple, put it one place, if it's blue, put it in another... right? These PHD students at a top university can keep track of that, can't they?
Very fuckin' funny. Do you do birthday parties?
Also in the washing room, only just inside the door, was the tray for dirty glassware - frequently encrusted with dried-up old agar (for growing bacteria on), mystery salts and other unspeakable residues. The pipette tip boxes, not exposed to such things, were relatively clean by comparison. I liked refilling them, as I could do it without gloves. Just so long as no thick, clueless fucker put the pipette tip boxes in the dirty glassware tray, anyway. But why would they do that? Doing that would save them having to walk two extra steps, or having to lean forwards a bit. But no cunt's that lazy, surely?
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Yep, not only were the tip boxes always being put in the glassware tray, this time some stupid piece of shit's seen fit to not only put them in there, but to put them in there in alpha-fuckin'-betical order.
You will notice, in the picture, that there are THREE empty boxes perched on the edge of the desk, clearly indicating and demonstrating where they are supposed to go. You might think that this is a little excessive, and that somebody ignoring so obvious a "monkey-see monkey-do" sign must be spectacularly stupid.
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Three wasn't nearly enough.
One day, a demhumidifier appeared. I don't remember where this was, but I do remember where it was was extremely inconvenient and in my way. So I decided to move it...
Filled to the absolute fucking brim, then just switched off and left. Presumably some alarm sounded when it filled up, and rather than actually do anything about it, some fucker just switched it off to "stop the noise".
Once a week, I used to clean a seperate lab, which had it's own lab coats and was used for growing cell cultures (and oh boy, do I have a magical oddysey of a tale about that room, for a later date). One morning I opened the sliding door and found a box of disposable gloves just laying upside-down in the middle of the floor. That was a bit strange. Then I turned around...
Yes, you are actually looking at this.
The thick fucking shit-for-brains CUNTS have gone and put a bracket for glove boxes on the sliding door. Sideways! Pretty soon a note appeared telling people to open the door slowly, "so the gloves don't fall out". Gee, if only there was possibly some way to prevent that? Nah, I'm coming up blank.
The building where I spent the second most amount of time, and where I ate my lunch and took breaks, had a head lab assistant. I called him Stammer. The phrase "Fuck you, Stammer" was muttered very often. Once upon a time, I told him we were running a bit low on Trigene, an extremely concentrated cleaning fluid which comes in 5l jugs. One of these jugs lasts for months and months, as it makes between 50 and 500l of the actual cleaning fluid, once it's diluted. I told him we were "running low" on it once, but there was "no rush" to get more. Then I open the cleaning supplies cupboard and see...
Fuck you, Stammer
On another occasion, he told me I'd not got any new flasks for growing bacteria in liquid samples out of stores. Last time I'd checked the lab's own store room, there had been plenty of them in there, right inside the door, on top of a disused old oven thing. How could he have missed them? I went and checked for myself...
Fuck you, Stammer
A lot of lab waste was treated as Category 2 microbiological waste, which means it contains bacteria that cause disease in animals, but they have been genetically modified and may also be able to jump to humans. Before being thrown out, all this stuff was tossed in big metal bins called "dixies", which contained a plastic bag which would crinkle up and "seal" when autoclaved. Autoclaving basically means putting it in a giant pressure cooker. Waste was disposed of by being autoclaved at 128oC for 30 minutes, at 2 bars of pressure.
Liquid category 2 waste was disposed of in the same way, only it was put inside containers able to resist autoclaving, and then, once sterilised, was tipped down the sink. The thicks had plenty of stupid, fucked-up ways to leave the waste for me to deal with, which you'll see in future posts, but let's start with this one, shall we? For once they had actually, sensibly left all the waste in the proper places. One bottle of liquid waste looked a little viscous and black, but never mind. I duly put it in the autoclave and wandered off to do something else. After the cycle, I came back, opened the door, and got a bit of a farmyardy whiff...
So what is this black residue exactly? It's shit, dear reader. SHIT. And not only have they put SHIT in a bottle for autoclaving, it turns out shit expands a lot under heat and pressure. The bottle had blasted it's lid off and sent the contents everywhere. A volcanic eruption of SHIT.
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Which was a positively delightful cleanup operation, as I suppose you can imagine.
And finally...
When you see it...