Let's kick things off with a good old classic. You'll be seeing this one a lot! The lab had several kinds of pipette tip boxes which could be refilled and re-used, to save on throwing away loads of plastic waste. You know, for the environment and all that. The sort of thing a prestigious institution of academia cares about, and makes strict policies on (policies like "we're only going to have 3 parking spaces from now on, hope you can afford to live in this second-to-London-expensive city on the inadequate wages we pay you!"). As these boxes are hand-refilled, it would be preferable if they weren't put in, say, the tray for used-up bacterial media bottles, which has a film of slimy, gooey, crispy old agar on it most of the time. So where are they constantly being put?

Boom. Drei Frücktascheier.

Oh come on, who's going to get that reference?

And why are they being put there, despite constant requests not to? Simple, that tray is just inside the door of the washing room. One thing you need to understand about scientists is they are the laziest, most bone-idle cunts on earth. They'll forget all of their principles about good lab practice, safety and the environment if it means they get to walk 2-3 steps fewer.

They are also somewhat monkey-see, monkey-do. If anybody fucks something up, by putting something in the wrong place, preparing media wrong, using a machine wrong or whatever else, you can bet another three of them will immediately start fucking up in the same way, because "don't we do it that way now?".

Positive examples, of how things should be done, though, those get completely ignored. Usually because doing something cleanly, properly and safely requires ever-so-slightly more effort. As a case in point, whoever put that pipette tip box in the disgusting gooey glassware tray did so whilst looking at this:

They really are this idle and ignorant.

At one point that "how many do I have to put there before you fuckers notice?" pile got so big, I had people asking me if the tips for refilling the boxes had ran out. Yes, OK, you see the pile now, do you? How about you act upon what you see? Nah, that'd mean walking another two steps.

Part of my job was to see when metal bins called Dixies were full, and take them for autoclaving. They were autoclaved at 128°C and 2 bars of pressure for 30 minutes, which obviously resulted in the plastics becoming a melted mess. So what has one of the thicks gone and done?

Yes, that's one of the refillable pipette tip boxes, thrown in the category 2* biohazard waste bin for destruction. And, you'll notice, it's NOT EVEN EMPTY. Somebody just decided they were "done with" that size of pipette tips and just threw the whole lot away, didn't even bring it for refilling. So fucking thick and idle they can't get out of the chair. There's another box of filtered tips in there too. These were more expensive than the regular ones, and there were regular emailed and posted-up warnings to only use them when they were really needed. Or, you know, just toss a whole box in the catgory 2 waste.

*-Category 2 means "bacteria that cause disease in animals, but which can potentially jump to humans". Various anti-infection precautions were (usually) taken in the lab, and they had to be thoroughly sterilised before being thrown out.

This was a common occurrence, too. The blue lab coats, when finished with, were also autoclaved inside these plastic bags, in order to make them safe before they were sent out to be laundered in the normal manner. You'll notice there's a bag up on the shelf for putting the used ones in. Somebody would always just get a fresh bag out to put their one in - being the special angel that they are. Too special, to say nothing of thick and idle, to bother looking or reaching up slightly and noticing there's a bag already up there. Never mind, eh? It's not them who has to go and fetch the rather weighty and unwieldy box of 500 bags when the old one runs out, so why should they care?

The bins with black bags were the normal waste, for office stuff, leftovers of people's lunch etc. Basically stuff that just gets chucked straight out for the bin men to collect, no special processing.

You know what shouldn't go in there? Stuff that can be recycled, like plastics. You know what really shouldn't go in there? Still-sealed sterile laboratory plasticware! Those well plates have been bought in at great expense, with certificates of sterility and sealed in individual packages... and some fucker's just tossed them because they're too fucking idle and thick to imagine anything else that could be done with them... such as, oh, I dunno, carrying them back to the store room for somebody else to use (what? All the way at the other end of the building? Walk that far?), or even just put them on a shelf in the lab for somebody else to use. Nah, just sling 'em into landfill. This an institution loudly trumpeting it's "commitment to the environment", of course.

This was another constantly-happening classic. Those orange bags are for serious biohzard waste, including dead animals, which were being sent for incineration. They frequently dripped unspeakable goo because some twat hadn't sealed them properly. The rules said we had to carry them out to the bins in one hand, wearing a disposable glove, as anything that touched even the outside of the bag was to also be regarded as contaminated.

So what did the fuckers to? CONSTANTLY toss them on top of clean cardboard in this trolley, waiting to be taken out to the recyling bins. This shit happened weekly. I put up a notice saying not to do it once, but the head lab assistant in that building, a nosey, dementia-addled old fart (who was always interrupting people's conversations, with his mouth full, to ask some bullshit question that didn't even have anything to do with what they were talking about) was constantly taking such notices down, as if he hadn't put them up, they didn't "count". Also his attitude to safety breaches like that was "wuh-wuh-wuh-we never bothed about that in thuh suh-suh-suh-suxties". I called him Stammer, for obvious reasons. Every morning I'd round the corner into the car park, begging for his car not to be there. Whenever it wasn't, it was cause for celebration. Then the fucker would roll in 5 minutes later. Doubtless telling me to "not get too comfortable" as it would "soon be nine". Like I can't pissing see the cunt clock. Cunt.

At one point I put a big cardboard box on top of the nearby filing cabinets, and tried to set that up as the new waste cardboars storage place. Stammer "helped" me by throwing out all the waste cardboard... INCLUDING the big box! He did this just as the bin men were coming to take the recyling. Not entirely an accident, I suspect.

Polished? FUCKING polished? What the fuck? Anyway, aside from the bizarre use of English (likely just directly translated from somebody's language), these metal cans were supposed to be used to dry sterilise (read: make REALLY hot in an electric oven) glass pipettes. On several occasions thick fuckers opened up 30-odd plastic pipettes (delivered in individual plastic-and-paper wrappers clearly labelled STERILE) and stuffed them into these metal cans, then left them next to the autoclave to be steam-sterilised. Once or twice some non-me person "helpfully" ran the autoclave with them in it. The cans ended up full of water (the cap overlapped with the body by about 5cm and was a pretty close fit) and took MONTHS to dry in the drying cabinet.

ALSO, the tape that was used for steam-sterilising had strips on it, which turned black once a certain temperature and humidity were reached, thus showing the contents had been autoclaved. That "polished" label isn't autoclave tape, it's just plain masking tape some clueless fucker dug up somewhere. So even if this was supposed to be autoclaved, they still fucked up. Layers upon layers of fucking up.

This one doesn't need explanation. The mind fucking boggles, it really does.

What's this tossed in a non-recycling landfill bin? Loads of plastic and even some steel piping? Of course it is, eh? Of course it fuck' is. I didn't take a "stinger" picture of how close the recycling bin was to this one, on this occasion. But you can bet it wasn't far.

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What should we do with these loose polystyrene chips, which blow about, choke birds, stay in the environment for ages and turn into microplastics and end up in your sandwiches? Bag them up, at all? Nah, just empty the lot, loose, into a non-recycling bin. With a few plastic air bags for good measure. Deflate the bags so we're not taking up space in the bin with fresh fucking air? Nah, that would require the immense effort of picking up a sharpened pencil, and jabbing them. Imagine having to do such an onerous task as that!

When the "dixie" metal bins were in use, the bags inside them were stretched over the edge (for several months they changed supplier, to really shitty, but slightly-cheaper ones, with seams which would explosively split while you tried to stretch them over the edges. Sometimes they'd split all the way down and become a useless flat sheet of plastic just by being taken out of the fucking box). When they were full (you'll notice, incedentally, quite the lack of "full" in the one in question) the bags were supposed to be folded inwards, a strip of autoclave tape applied, and then a lid put on. These geniuses, working at one of Britain's top seats of learning and research, you'll remember, regularly failed to follow even those four simple steps. Well it's not like they had two other ones, done correctly, right next to it in order to remind them, is it? Oh, wait... You'll notice a lot of repetition of this theme in future posts, too. This is actually one of the least fucked-up examples.