It's been one of THOSE days
Do you ever have days when things just don't go well? LOL I know--silly question. We all have days like that. Well, today was my turn.
WARNING ::: Geek Talk about to be spoken
First of all today was one of my days at work when both an LCM (laser capture microdissection) and a RT-PCR (real time polymerase chain reaction) were scheduled for the same day. It makes for a busy day and that's often nice--but busy. I do the staining and such on the LCM until around noon and then hand off the samples to my coworker Tach (he's a MD and they prefer MDs to do tissue dissection even when they're just tissue slices on a slide) and then start up the RT-PCR which takes a few hours to set up. Unfortunately I only have one RT machine available to me and it's shared with a dozen or so labs so I can't afford to miss a slot I've signed up for. I only get one or two chances a week, and I need to sign up a week in advance, so there's no way to know how it's going to affect the rest of my schedule.
As an aside, this sort of thing is pretty common in science research. This is due to the equipment being expensive, often very expensive, and so several departments will buy something like this real time-PCR machine because none of them could afford it alone. And then you have 20 or 30 people all wanting to use it any given week and due to the amount of time a run takes (typically 3 hours) only 3 or 4 people a day can use it. So it's once or twice a week per person.
Anyway, that was the reason I was late leaving work and when I hit the park-and-ride lot I found out that my car battery was dead. As a doorknob. Corpus dilecti. Wouldn't even turn over. And worse of all it was my own fault. I'd had my truck for just over 6 years and it's the original battery. I knew I was living on borrowed time--but didn't replace the damn thing. And so I had to pay to have someone come by and jump my truck and then scoot out and buy a new battery before the stores close since by the time my truck was running it was dark and quite late. What a day!
That's my whining for the day! :-)
WARNING ::: Geek Talk about to be spoken
First of all today was one of my days at work when both an LCM (laser capture microdissection) and a RT-PCR (real time polymerase chain reaction) were scheduled for the same day. It makes for a busy day and that's often nice--but busy. I do the staining and such on the LCM until around noon and then hand off the samples to my coworker Tach (he's a MD and they prefer MDs to do tissue dissection even when they're just tissue slices on a slide) and then start up the RT-PCR which takes a few hours to set up. Unfortunately I only have one RT machine available to me and it's shared with a dozen or so labs so I can't afford to miss a slot I've signed up for. I only get one or two chances a week, and I need to sign up a week in advance, so there's no way to know how it's going to affect the rest of my schedule.
As an aside, this sort of thing is pretty common in science research. This is due to the equipment being expensive, often very expensive, and so several departments will buy something like this real time-PCR machine because none of them could afford it alone. And then you have 20 or 30 people all wanting to use it any given week and due to the amount of time a run takes (typically 3 hours) only 3 or 4 people a day can use it. So it's once or twice a week per person.
Anyway, that was the reason I was late leaving work and when I hit the park-and-ride lot I found out that my car battery was dead. As a doorknob. Corpus dilecti. Wouldn't even turn over. And worse of all it was my own fault. I'd had my truck for just over 6 years and it's the original battery. I knew I was living on borrowed time--but didn't replace the damn thing. And so I had to pay to have someone come by and jump my truck and then scoot out and buy a new battery before the stores close since by the time my truck was running it was dark and quite late. What a day!
That's my whining for the day! :-)
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