I’m all for quality but if I have to do another bloody CAP survey this month I’m going to make someone eat it.
Sorry about the warm auto, bbs2k. I think it’s sort of universal that when a blood banker sees the autocontrol come up positive, you hear a shriek of “noooooooo!!!” stretch out across the hospital.
It’s lab week? Is it a different week in the US or something? We sure didn’t get the memo.
wanders off to continue the workup on his new osmometer
I got popcorn every day this week, and a pizza lunch today. Plus I took my last exam of my last class for my MS degree, so it’s been a busy week.
Vlad/Igor
“It’s an odd sort of job” I mused tonight as I was fixing a problem with a hematology analyzer worth tens of thousands of dollars by taping bits of cardboard to it.
Says it all really.
(It keeps dropping specimen tubes which then roll away inside its electronic guts so I was blocking up the holes where the tubes fall in.)
We get this, not so infrequently.
Though, the best excuse about a sample that I ever heard from a nurse was, upon being asked why she had not labeled the patient’s tubes (and in our lab, unlabeled blood specimens on patients older than 6mos of age are auto-reject):
“We ran out of labels.”
:dubious: Head, meet desk.
You should see the ‘this old house’ fixes we implement on this thing on a daily basis.
Hah! I once fixed an A1c instrument with duct tape and thread! QC worked on every run. That’s one of the thing I don’t like about newer instrumentation, it’s getting harder and harder to troubleshoot some of this newer stuff that simply shuts down and refuses to work until you’re forced to call in service.
I’ve worked in a couple smaller labs, with older instruments where I got to work all night on an overnight shift with screwdrivers, fine- pliers, and specialized tools taking these things apart and putting them back together.
Then two hours later, after calibration is complete, background checks are clean, and QC is once again within all the limits… victory!
Nice.
We have an automated refrigerated stockyard at the end of our automated line, and whenever it’s time for it to fill up the spots on the top level, we get suicide tubes. See, if the labels are frayed and sticky, the grippers can’t pull them out of the carriers properly so they’re sitting too low… and then the little shuttle comes out of the stockyard door to get it but instead of the tube plopping down into the shuttle, the shuttle smacks the tube and flings it out of the gripper. Then we spend 5 minutes trying to find the tube, which is sometimes lying on the conveyor belt, leisurely making its way back around the line.
So, essentially, you’ll hear - “plunk!”… and someone will call out “tube overboard” even before the screeching alarm activates. When we see it’s loading a bunch of tubes onto level 3, often someone will stand by the stockyard on “suicide watch”. Yeah, we’re weirdos.
Sometimes our machine will just throw error messages at us. Vague error messages. … In German.
Then we call service, and cry.