The Lab Monkey Thread of Joy and Despair

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Hey folks. I'm back on marking again for another year. Gone a bit high-tech now though, we're using Turnitin. Anybody got any [experience / horror stories] of using it for grading? It seems a bit buggy at times.

Only that it's crap. Academic staff think it contains the whole world, and don't seem to realise that if work is plagiarised from a book (or millions of unincluded sources) it won't come up. (See GOGSoc for my fun fun experiences with a Masters student lifting an essay 80% wholesale from a pop science book).

Reply 421

Cirsium

I fail at life. Somehow managed to get distracted and take a PCR off before it even finished. I didn't even notice until I realised I was holding a hot tube. :facepalm:

Reply 422

Cora Lindsay

Oh good. Safety inspection next week, including the Faculty Head of Health and Safety, and the Head of Department. Just "routine" but we will doubtless be doing something wrong. Nice news for a Friday afternoon.......

Reply 423

Cirsium

You would think, given my line of work, that I would know that homeologous primers work significantly better when the SNP is at the 3' end. Apparently I didn't know this. Apparently I have designed 40 primers not knowing this. :banghead:

On the plus side, some of them have worked beautifully because I did this completely by accident.

Reply 424

Democracy

I realise I'm postgrad and therefore supposedly mature, but I still had to bite my tongue to stop myself laughing when my lecturer referrred to the "sucking" and "blowing" function when demonstrating how to use the pipette gun.

Once again, I apologise. I put it down to nervousness :sigh:

Reply 425

Cirsium

Got that Monday feeling. Apparently I was being just too awesome so I had to do some un-awesomeness to balance it. Ran a gel backwards. This wouldn't be so bad had I not run the entire PCR product :facepalm:

Reply 426

Cirsium

There's some stupid stressy technician from Agilent swanning around and I was trying to do things quickly so as to not be in his way, and just realised that the PCR program I'm running I edited yesterday so the extension time was 45 seconds not 75. NEB don't actually give extension time guidelines for OneTaq so I've always used the same as I do for Qiagen, and have no idea whether it might magically work anyway, so there's no point wasting money setting the whole thing up again until I know. GROWL.

Reply 427

Cirsium

Original post by Athena

Asian Scottish guy, RA? He's good at qPCR if it's the same person and actually pretty sound :smile:

Nope. This one wasn't sound. He was mainly stressy. And flaily.

Reply 428

cpchem

Agilent are conning bastards. The call-out fee for one of their technicians to look at our GC/MS was £665, with a parts quote of nearly £10k. The boss made me order the cheapest of said parts (£200-ish) and fit it myself. Problem fixed. Just another two problems to solve and it might actually work again!

Reply 429

Cirsium

Oh PCR... Why do you never do what I want / expect?!

Reply 430

cpchem

Original post by Cirsium

Oh PCR... Why do you never do what I want / expect?!

You're after a reason... other than 'science is a git'?

Reply 431

Cirsium

Original post by cpchem

You're after a reason... other than 'science is a git'?

You sound like my supervisor.

Boo: ARGH THIS IS FRUSTRATING?!?! IT MAKES NO SENSE!!! WHY?!?! :rage:

Boo's supervisor: No... It's science

*Boo unleashes fire and brimstone*

Reply 432

Cora Lindsay

Original post by Cirsium

You sound like my supervisor.

Boo: ARGH THIS IS FRUSTRATING?!?! IT MAKES NO SENSE!!! WHY?!?! :rage:

Boo's supervisor: No... It's science

*Boo unleashes fire and brimstone*

Enrico Fermi got different results, depending on whether he did his experiment on a marble bench or a wooden table, and that led to a Nobel Prize, so hang on in there.....

Reply 433

hollywoodbudgie

longs to one day join this thread... :moon:

Reply 434

Democracy

Technician may have accidentally messed up my group's Western blot by adding transfer buffer instead of running buffer :hmpf:

With any luck though it should be okay.

Reply 435

Cirsium

Original post by Democracy

Technician may have accidentally messed up my group's Western blot by adding transfer buffer instead of running buffer :hmpf:

With any luck though it should be okay.

You have a technician who runs your blots for you? You get no sympathy :p:

Reply 436

Democracy

Original post by Cirsium

You have a technician who runs your blots for you? You get no sympathy :p:

Yes but we're MSc students...so technically useless still :wink:

Reply 437

cpchem

Gah... the last few weeks of experiments are completely worthless. Grrrrr...

Reply 438

username68316

Original post by cpchem

Gah... the last few weeks of experiments are completely worthless. Grrrrr...

Is there any way that it has possibly been worthwhile? Maybe if you repeat those techniques you'll be in a better position to do them again, and faster/more efficiently?

Reply 439

username68316

On a negative note, practically: Most of my SDS-PAGE gels come out looking RUBBISH and I can't pinpoint why. I did a restriction digest for my plasmid and NOTHING was cut by my two enzymes. And finally on a colony PCR most of the inserts amplified as they were meant to, but for some there is an inexplicable laddering effect below the band of interest :frown: