A new flavor of "fuck you" for humanity's ancient enemy

The BBQ Pit
1

Let me tell you a bit about myself and what I do.

As a research assistant in a genetics lab the work I do is dependent on a plentiful supply of rich, savory human DNA. My bosses and their collaborators have traveled the world to obtain blood samples from volunteers in certain distinct populations. From these we isolate the white blood cells and culture them up to a volume where we can harvest a proverbial assload of cells whose elegant and frail molecular machinery we then shred with a variety of unfriendly chemicals to get at their creamy, mouthwatering nucleic acids. Lately we’ve had a lot of those. Let me tell you it takes a lot of time to feed all 180+ that I have taken into my care.

Earlier in the evening I was staying late to dole out growth medium a cluster of flasks when I hear the phone ring in the other room. Being 6:30 PM, this is long after official business hours for any of our vendors or collaborators and an hour after most lab personnel have left. This gets me to thinking that it’s one of my supervisors with some urgent task for me, since I usually stay late; it’s happened before. Trouble is, right then I was in the middle of going down a row of flasks giving a healthy 5ml serving to each.

The medium is expensive, I think.

“But they could need to tell me to change out the liquid nitrogen for the freezers. The alarm for the incubator could be going off. Precious data could be on the line!”

Haste makes waste and bacterial-contamination is like unto death.

“Shit, you’re right.”

I finish, rise from the biosafety cabinet, and remove my labcoat and other assorted PPE all superman-style, ready to be a hero. I round the corner to the phone and answer. After a pause, the voice of an unfamiliar female whose either got marbles in her mouth or simultaneously moonlighting as a snaggle-toothed fellatio elf begins her spiel:

“Hello, I am calling on behalf of (sasgweleaghl) and we are conducting a brief survey (jl;agsjha;sdjfs) household (sajghs;ljghs;ljfhs) financial (sa;ghsj;asjfhslkfgwekgfs).”

A telemarketer! A telemarketer dares interrupt my cultivating the very lifeblood of my work!

“I’m sorry, this is a lab not a household,” I say rather forcefully.

“I’m sorry I have the wrong number the–”

“Yeah, bye then.”

It bugs me that I wasn’t quicker on the draw with a dessicating “You sure do!” instead of a comparatively friendly “bye.” These fuckers weren’t even deserving of that courtesy (even if that wench could somehow manage to pronounce a semicolon). See, the lab I work at operates out of the medical school at a major American university with the same 3 digit prefix on all of its phone numbers. It would seem, then, that they must’ve just had some algorithm for tracking down working numbers regardless of whether or not they filtered out commercial, academic, or industrial institutions and dialing them in their feeble attempt to trawl for information on their target demographic.

I shoulda asked for the manager. I shoulda suggested that they filter their numbers a little better so he could maybe get promoted to a different position. Maybe one where he or she wouldn’t be receiving career advice from an irate research assistant.

But sometimes I’ve got the wit of a three-toed sloth, so no dice.

In summary, my pitting is threefold:

1.) Stupid telemarketers interrupting my work because they dial academic institutions instead of interrupting some poor sap’s dinner.

2.) The same idiots whose slapdick methods fall into a time of the evening when a phone call to the lab make me think that something dire is afoot.

3.) Myself for not excoriating them properly.

Dipshits.

2

Now, see, what your lab needs to do is breed some super-cells – oh, maybe start with some nice juicy natural killer cells. Cross-breed them with electronic viruses. Train them with scrapings from telemarketers’ phone mouthpieces to recognize the spoor of that loathsome life form. Then inject them into the telecommunications network.

Wouldn’t that be fun? :wink:

3

You should have said in a tightly-controlled but urgent voice: “EVCH. Report.”

Then, when the telemarketer goes into its spiel, rip it a new asshole:

"This is the Emergency Viral Contamination Hotline at <location>, a Class Four isolation lab, and we’re the ones 911 calls when it’s starting to look like The Hot Zone out there. What the fuck, are you doing calling this number? Who gave you authorisation? I broke off <expensive, tricky work> to take this call.

We’ll be billing your organisation for all replacement costs, plus quadruple damages at a minimum. Homeland Security and our lawyers will have your job and your company’s balls in the morning."

:smiley:

4

Well, we are BL2… :dubious:

In retrospect, I suppose faulting them for calling any goddamned number they found worked might be out of line: perhaps just shooting their load off into the ether like that was the only way to make their study statistically sound? I doubt that, but I’m not formally instructed in statistics. So, in the interest of making up for having potentially jumped the gun, who’s full of shit: them for not checking that they were dialing actual residential numbers, or me for calling them on that?

Whatever the case, my second and third points still stand. They interrupted me and made me think that an emergency was brewing, and I still failed to tell that bitch what for.

It also occurs to me that this would be a great way to get rid of such people in the future. Instead of bitching at them for interrupting what-have-you, nail their asses to the wall for calling your “place of business.” A man’s home is his castle? Well, who’s to say it can’t be his office too?

5

Are there still telemarketers auto-dialing every number in an exchage sequentially: xxx-xxx-0000, xxx-xxx-0001, xxx-xxx-0002…? That might explain how they got your work number. But is that kind of sequential auto-dialing legal with the US Don’t Call List?

6

Single cell phones.

THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES!!!

7

It’s a neat idea, but that’d probably create some grant issues. :stuck_out_tongue:

By the way, what happened to CRorex?

8

The disdain of telemarketers can be agreed on by almost every Doper.

I’m curious about your lab, though. (Heh, don’t even have to ring you to poll you.) I may be glorifying your job, but anything involving genetic research sounds a bit important. It may not be practical to involve other labs in this, but wouldn’t it make sense to have a Nextel-style mobile phone system that incorporates walkie-talkie features? That would allow for faster and more direct communication. If people aren’t normally at the lab when this happened it would seem better to be able to contact a technician in a way other than an office line. And if another lab really needs to get hold of someone after the lab is normally empty, it seems a much better way to go about it.

Just my 2 cents. Again, I have no idea the real world feasability in your case.

9

What? Do you write for the sci-fi channel?

10

Cloned!

11

Surely you mean “clpned.”

12

:: shifty eyes ::

Are you trying to steal my idea for a script?

:: suspicious glare ::

13

While Khan probably has more intellectually and technically challanging tasks, I can speak from experience and say that feeding cell cultures differs from feeding cows only in that cell cultures don’t slobber on you.

That would imply cooperation between labs!

Seriously. I’m a post-doctoral researcher at a major institution, and in my experience every lab has a slew of hidden reagents, idiosyncratic protocols, specialized equipment, etc… I wouldn’t want to mess with anyone else’s problems for fear of making them worse. On occasion I’ve dealt with something obvious like a freezer breaking (Grab everything. Put in working freezer. Sort out later.) but most equipment is sufficiently well protected/insulated that it can be left broken overnight without undue harm. CO2 tanks for incubators being the only major exception I can think of offhand.

mischievous

14

You’ve got a cool idea, duffer, but such a communication system isn’t necessary. There are multiple levels of authority/seniority in the lab that check things like the nitrogen daily. Even if it were to run out overnight, the actual fluid in the freezer would keep things at a brisk -70 for a good 8 hours or so. True, you can never have too many redundant safeguards, but in a business where a couple ounces of reagents can cost upwards of $1500, peer systems of trust and responsibility are cheap and extremely reliable alternatives.

And that’s to say nothing of the fact that the lab workers are scattered over south-central Connecticut (I’m the only one that lives within blocks of the lab. As such my cell phone is a sacred blade of justice and purity and a;slkjghsa;ljths;rljt). Apart from that, the building’s structure seems to be rather hostile to wireless communication.

Even though split-second issues are so rare as to be nonexistant, an unspoken rule of thumb is better now than later. If I hear a phone in ring after hours, my natural assumption is that someone is pretty keen on seeing if someone’s still there and has a pretty important issue to discuss. It really makes me want a 2x4 with a couple of rusty nails pounded into it at odd angles when some jackass calls asking about my financial concerns (not that it’s any of their horsefucking business anyway).

At any rate, growth medium is expensive, and needs to be at least at room temperature to use, considering that we keep the cells at 37C. I had just enough medium for 20 flasks 5ml/flask when the phone rang. We store it in a refrigerator in 1 liter volumes, and that action can take a couple hours to warm to the proper temp, hence my dilemma. Reason prevailed, though, and I filled my flasks with enough time to answer the phone. I just resent that my concern was for less than nothing. Stupid telemarketers. Again, they’re supposed to bug us at dinner; not at work for Chrissake.

And greetings to you, mischievous. It’s cool to hear from someone who works in a similar environment. If you worked in our lab, I’d probably have taught you how to use our robots. :smiley:

15

Thanks to the OP, I’ve learned that nucleic acids are creamy! I got a whole bioinformatics certificate and this tidbit wasn’t mentioned once!

16

My rule of thumb after hours in the lab is that if it’s really truly important, they’ll call back. :smiley:

17

And my rule of thumb is that anyone calling after hours is one of the pig-stupid nurses that can’t seem to figure out that the respiratory ward phone has a different prefix. Og help their patients.

Good to meet you, too, Khan. There’s quite a few biomed/biotech people on the boards, I can’t remember who most of them are, though. It just comes up in the course of other threads.

He’s putting it kindly. Bulk preparations of DNA have the texture and viscosity of high-quality snot. Except clear.

mischievous

18

It is also sweet as the finest honey, and fragrant as ambrosia.

Plus it spreads like country crock.

Everyone likes a good crock now and then, don’t you?

19

Dude, you’re not suppossed to eat the stuff.

20

And now we know the kind of stuff bio-med guys talk about over beer. High-quality nucleic acid snot.

:wink: