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Don’t put it in a baggie. All very cold freezers get snow, ice, and foggy. If you ever want to find your shit again, put it in something large enough to locate in a snowdrift. No microcentrifuge tubes outside of a container either. Jeez.
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Make sure it’s well-labeled. Labeling tape does not stick if it’s (1) wet or (2) cold. It gets both in a snowdrift in the freezer. Put it in a box so you can write directly on the box rather than relying on tape that will come off.
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Why are you storing shit anyway? Keep something valuable that you want to have around for a while at -80˚C, do you know what electricity costs?
Morons. I’m surrounded by morons.
… actual shit or metaphorical shit?
Can you make them dig barehanded for their own shit, or is this something you get stuck doing? A few cases of frostbite on these idiots might serve as a learning experience, or at least make you feel better.
Once you’ve got one item in the freezer, does it cost appreciably more if people cram it to the bursting point?
Maybe the shit is taking up space that could be used for not shit.
Also, be considerate. Get your shit in and out quickly. I had an entire season’s worth of samples turn to a green slurry because one dipshit spent a week opening the freezer, taking one item out, closing it, opening it, taking one item out, closing it, opening it…
:mad:
I, too, and wondering why Super Kapowzler is interested in deep freeze storage. And shit.
I thrive on ambiguity, but I should admit that it’s just metaphorical shit. Most of the actual (non-human) shit gets stored dried or fixed, so the freezer would be overkill. But I know whose sample it was that got me started, so my opinion of its value is pretty shitty as well.
It costs in terms of time. Organizationally, you really want these freezers tidy so people can get in and out of them quickly and efficiently. As Ogre observes, some slack-jawed doofus trying to find their sample can cost hundreds of dollars in samples or reagents if they take too long, especially as freezers get older and it takes longer for them to return to -80 after the door’s been opened. One of ours is getting a bit long in the tooth, and all the really valuable stuff is getting moved into the newer one. Don’t even get me started on people who don’t know how to re-seal the liquid nitrogen Dewar. :mad:
I only personally have to deal with -20 C, but I still sympathize.
Tacked-on rant: if you’re going to be enough of a jerk as to choose the -20C freezer as the item to unplug so that you can plug in an infrequently-used instrument that you just need for a few minutes? It’d be awfully nice if you could plug it back in. Or better yet, if you do this in the late afternoon so that the techs come in to an alarm bright and early the next morning, why couldn’t you have picked the empty biologics fridge instead? Extra bonus points for your action happening the afternoon before a study patient was due in the next morning, such that 3 vials of a delicate experimental drug were ruined and we had to send the patient home.
Meanwhile, I had to make a “do not unplug this -20 freezer” tag to go around its plug - as if we’re not all a bunch of grownups here - and hope that they look before pulling the plug. Maybe I should set it up to shock anyone touching it.
Truly, you are afflicted with the same type of moron I see!
If it’s that critical, it might be worth it to put a lock on it like this or one of the types that screws into the outlet cover screw, preventing removal without extreme determination? Seems like it would be worth the money to prevent this sort of incident.
It’d be nice, but unfortunately it’s not located in an area I have control over, even though it’s my division’s freezer. I’m also positive that whoever unplugged it far outranks me, so a complaint to the head of the area didn’t produce any further information. Fortunately, the passive-aggressive-looking plug tag has prevented further incidents. For now.
I’m also glad I don’t have any frozen drugs at the moment, so that helps too. Maybe I’ll snag one of those if we get another study using frozen drugs and install it without permission (and deny knowing how it got there); thanks for the link! Meanwhile, we have our own drug fridge in our own office suite, so we don’t have to share a fridge any longer and can monitor it ourselves.
Perhaps the shit’s in cryogenic storage so that future generations may one day discover a cure for wolf ass.
Not to mention that the longer you leave the door open, ice accumulates in the folds of the door seal. Eventually, it will get so bad that the door won’t close properly and you have to chisel it out or defrost. Moving samples to another freezer to allow for defrosting can affect the samples, especially if they’re purified proteins. Also, you can eventually kill one or even both compressors. It’s about half the cost of a freezer to replace those compressors.
Unorganized freezers is a pet peeve of mine but freezer maintenance is one of the hardest thing to enforce.
I’d be tempted to fire that person unless he is usually a good worker. Who would think to unplug the -20 in the first place? There were no other plugs?? That just sounds like someone too stupid to be working in a lab.
While I sympathize, if we got rid of all the people too stupid to be working in a lab, labs would be nearly empty - hmmm, actually that doesn’t sound bad at all! 
I work on the “bedside”* end of the bench/bedside divide in medical research. The freezer in question is in a procedure room. I’m 99% sure it was a MD who did that, so they automatically are considered way more important than me and my paltry concerns. Even so, the annoyance of the MD who was the main investigator on the study didn’t result in the culprit being identified, and since we didn’t actually have to pay for any ruined drug, then to him a one-time incident becomes a rescheduling annoyance that is Not His Problem rather than a “WTF, are you an idiot?!” situation.
- Not literally; I work with outpatients, not inpatients.
Just remember that storing whomever did that in the -20 freezer is illegal. Even though, if I was in the jury, I would have been willing to believe the idjit locked hirself in.
I have the book, “At the Helm” and it encourages PIs to avoid hiring people just to get bodies in the lab. Less is always more. Be highly selective. Of course, I didn’t follow that advice and paid the price!
Ah! Say no more, say no more. 
It’s a dorm-size freezer, but it does lock. I’ll claim they were trying to do a new “cold yoga” contortionist-type move and apparently something went terribly wrong. (What do you mean there isn’t an opposite of the Bikram/hot yoga? There is now!)
Yeah, exactly. Plus it was “just” a baseline visit and the PI wasn’t the one who had to reschedule anything (three guesses who handled that, first two don’t count), so even the PI didn’t care since it hasn’t happened again.
No problem. I’ve often wondered why critical equipment doesn’t have those installed in more places. I mean, they don’t cost much and can prevent an accidental or incidental unplugging of equipment that shouldn’t be.
Don’t even get me started.
We have a -70C freezer for our skin, tendons, and other tissue for transplant. For some reason (probably a budgetary one) microbiology can’t be arsed to get their own freezer, so they store their controls on one of our freezer shelves. Oh, and when chemistry’s old freezer is on the fritz, they move their controls over, too. Last time that happened the bloody thing was on alarm all the time because they’d pop the door open and rummage around in there looking for what they needed. Good luck explaining to these people that these tissues need to stay in a narrow range of very cold temperatures or we can’t use them and oh my GOD they are expensive, plus we’ll have to explain to the AABB and FDA why our tissue freezer records show such a mess for that month.