Ugh. I think -80 freezer could give the office refrigerator a run for its money for most annoying work appliance.
In my current lab, our -80 went down (at 5:30, naturally). After it was fixed, we decided to organize and inventory the contents instead of just throwing them back in there. Since no inventory, labeling, naming or storage system had ever been instituted, every box was a mystery to be solved. Most of them we ended up just coding with who had done the work, so we ended up with multiple “Sarah” boxes, etc. So very helpful when you need to find something. :dubious:
But, wait! It gets better!
There were a bunch of boxes (a rackful, to be specific) that no one, including the PI could identify in any way. No idea who did the work, what the boxes contained or even what kind of samples the box contained (DNA? Bacteria? Media? Buffer?). I want to throw them out. My PI says to put them in their own rack and call them “orphan” boxes. :dubious: Why? Because “someone might write to us and request this stuff and we need to be able to ship it to them”. But we don’t know what it is!!!
I bitch about my workplace a fair amount, but one of the awesome things about it is the freezer alarm system. All of the freezers and incubators are hooked up to a central alarm system, where you can set what the allowable temperature range is. The central alarm system rings the security people if anything deviates. If anything goes into alarm temporarily during the normal work day, they assume it’s one of us with the door open and they don’t worry about it. If it goes off persistently or during non-work hours, they come out to investigate. If there’s someone there dicking around, they yell at them. If there’s no one there (i.e. midnight equipment failure), they have a list of everyone’s phone numbers for each lab, and they’ll call down the list until they get a response. It’s pretty cool, and it’s saved important samples more than once.
And before you ask, yes, they have special exceptions for freezers that are being defrosted or are already known to be broken - you just call security and tell them “Freezer number 12345 (written on the front of the freezer, bless them) is being defrosted today. Please take it off the system.” They say “Okay, we’ll put it back on at 5:00 tomorrow, is that okay?”
It’s AWESOME.