unprepared labmates - (Jul/14/2009 )

toejam on Jul 14 2009, 11:56 AM said:

Dear Toejam,

I agree with one of the others posters......get safety involved.
If that does not work go to the top.....Director of Institute/Lab Manager/Group Leader. The equipment I take it is communal so any breakdown will impact on others.
If it persists then give the individual all the rubbish jobs in the lab....bore them into submission.

gebirgsziege on Sep 23 2009, 10:41 PM said:

I think you should be a very helpful lab member. When their run has finished, take their tubes out of the cycler and place them in a safe place, like the back of the -20 freezer, or the round filing cabinet with the plastic lining ("I'm sorry, I thought you didn't want it any more, because you left without taking it from the machine."). In case the experiment turns out to be important, do the first, but tell them the second.
Be sarcastic. "What am I, your mother?"
Be direct. "Stop being such a lazy bum and take out your c#$p from the machine."
If they show any aptitude in science, get them to start your PCR experiments, because you had to finish theirs for them.

But do it all with a smile, or they might think you're a psycho...

Ouch swanny. Remind me to never tick you off! Well, it won't hurt the PCR machine to run all night on 4C, but I can understand why it's a PITA for you.

A nice way to remind people to take care of their business is to leave passive-aggressive notes all over the lab. My favorite (posted by another tech): "Pick up after yourself, or be fed to wild animals." If you work in an infectious disease lab, make a sign saying, "If you leave it on the bench, we will inoculate you with it."

Is that really that big of a deal?? We do this for each other in the lab all the time- no point in sticking around waiting for a run to finish just so you can take the tubes out, if someone else will still be there anyway. Or check cells/virus stocks/set up bacterial cultures etc for others on the weekend if we are going to be in anyway....

Maybe it is because you are already annoyed with this person??

@leelee: I think it is because somebody might need the PCR after this person. The annoying thing is that you have to think who set up the PCR so you can place it with their name in the freezer. And the most annoying is if the persons do not lable their tubes, I was once nearly killed by such a "lab mate" (who left BEFORE lunch that day) because I took out her PCR products (in the same order as they were in the machine) which were not labelled.....and I really needed the thermocycler to finish my exp.

@swanny: I think I should come to your place to learn although they are afraid of me already esp if I am smiling
BUT I would never ever ask these people to set up my exp....I need my results and do not trust most of my lab mates even to prepare a stock of ecoli recently one of them was trying to clone into a yeast which was growing as contamination on her plate instead of ecoli......

i wouldn't mind taking out his pcr tubes if he had asked me. instead he asked how long was i staying in the lab, since i said not late he asked the pi .
i guess i'm annoyed with this person, not only because i think he's irresponsible, ignorant about lab safety, lazy, impertinent and snotty but also because he's not interested in science at all and wants to get people to guide him through protocols, which is fine...until it is every single time!!
just like the time he left the waterbath on and called me asking me to turn it off, i asked him "where are you now?" and he said "i'm just out of the department....." well!! get your @$$ back to the lab and turn it off yourself!! instead he called one of the postdocs

Fair call, toejam- he sounds like a PhD student we once had. In which case, I feel your pain and feel free to rant incessently in future with only my full support
Always needing help for EVERYTHING and needing cleaning up after.
He said he was only doing a PhD so that he could get a better job back home (China), and that he chose Biology because "it is easy, and research in Australia is not very good, so I will finish in 1 year".
Needless to say, he soon quit- we then found out that we were the 3rd lab he had tried to do a PhD in (got fired from one previously and quit from the other). Apparently the uni gave him ANOTHER chance, and he is now doing the same things in his new lab............

this guy doesn't look Chinese, but he might as well be the twin soul to your ex labmate.... hopefully he won't be around much longer (fingers crossed)
anyway....he wasn't even able to realize the modem on the computer he tried to use was off, then had to switch to a different computer

hey hombre......didn't we have this line of discussion before or something quite similar? Must I remind you of the universal rule: there has to be a jerk in every lab and in your previous lab you were so lucky to have two...so now you're almost an expert in dealing with them. Besides, the problem will most probably take care of itself. If he's not so interested in science nor in doing lab work, he won't last for long. Meanwhile, take it easy then ......

does he insist on using the new shiny equipment, even though it has nothing to do with the project he's supposed to be researching?
does he not attempt to do any quality control before jumping headlong into a big experiment? ("why bother checking the quality of the DNA or RNA?")
does he spend all day chatting up the girls in the other lab (or looking at stuff on the net) instead of actually doing work?
does he not look at the lab protocols?
5 minutes before he does an experiment on new equipment he has never used before, does he then ask how to do it?
does he then look completely suprised when he realises that it takes longer than 2 minutes to set everything up?
does he casually mention that he was in on the weekend working (even though it was to just check on some cells) when the boss is around?
controls? what controls?
read papers? what papers? ("V, i couldn't find any papers on mfg, could you find some for me?")
does he look completely stressed out when his great big experiment doesn't work... and has a heart attack (metaphorically) when his little experiments also don't work?
does his experimental data suddenly change when it's pointed out to him that it was not what we expected to see? (ie, we wanted to kill some cells. Friday, he saw that all the cells were alive... come Monday, his Friday's observation has changed to seeing 70% cell death. or a dose dependent curve: cells originally increased at 2X.... at the second look, they increased 4X)
have you found your stuff on his bench? ie a wrack with MY name on in, but it's turned around so my name's hidden?

'cause if he does... i think he's just joined my lab.

actually, just a quick rant.... he was treating some cells, on a glass cover slip. anyway, he said the cells looked fine. i checked up on them, they were mostly dead and floating. anyway, he kept the chemicals on them for far too long (days after i checked on them!!), and then stained the slide. he looked out for the one or two cells that had survived, and then said it was typical of the entire slide. no, that's not the way you do it. either do it properly or not at all!! end rant.

V