Me!!!

I spent all afternoon doing an experiment, than at about 6.15 I was on the last step which involved adding something to my cells. I picked up the wrong bottle and added the wrong thing so I wasted a whole day and killed my cells!

ARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

How thick is that? Anyone else made any mistakes like that before? Confess and make me feel less thick! Ican't be the only one? Can I?

Easily done. I added the wrong solvent to the sample I was extracting not long ago and had to throw it away. Luckily it was a quality control sample i.e. my blood (plenty more where that came from!) rather than a precious patient sample! It made me concentrate harder on the next batch of samples though. Don't let it worry you, it happens to everyone at some stage.

Ermmm, I can think of one but it wasn't me. When I used to work as a lab chemist, my supervisor there told me about the time during his PhD where he had made his final compound (that was like 50 million steps) and he had it evaporating on HIS rotary evaporator. Some numpty in his research group decided she wanted to use his equipment and decided there was nothing in his flask and washed it away.......

So Jen, I can honestly say that you are not thick.

Corrupting other people's work is far, far worse. One of my colleagues accidently bowled over a load of conical flasks containing my carefully prepared calibration standards - with a PEAR!! [Yes, we do have a no food in lab rule but she popped in en route to the tea room and somehow lost her grasp on it!]

I managed to blow a power supply on an incredibly expensive piece of equipment. But I like to think it was time for it to die as opposed to I caused it.

Long time ago, I conducted four group interviews, every for two hours (can you imagine how hard it was to find and to persuade around 40 people to come to the interview and they were no "convinient" undergrads) and recorded in dictophone and lost the bag with all the tapes........:( no data, no study, no paper:((

doesn't matter!
life is all about mistakes...but be careful the next time...PhD students are supposed to be very upright, carefull and allert.

Yesterday i was growing my bacteria and inducing expression from the promoter I wanted but forgot to turn the shaker on overnight. Today is wasted as what I should have left running overnight I'm doing today.

Tonk.

I was recently on fieldwork studying saltmarshes and was crossing a creek. The tide was rising pretty quickly and my notebook in my pocket (but obviously not deep enough in my pocket) got sucked out by the water and four days worth of data recording was washed out to sea.

Luckily the next morning finishing the experiment I found a few torn pages of my notebook, and further along the shore I found the rest of it! So after drying it out with a hairdryer everything was OK...

LOL@ the coastman