You may not need to see their bellies but I need to see their bellies. I need it man.
ronry, so so ronry
They’re college students, for godssakes. The status of being a college student, by custom, confers the right to wear whatever, wherever and whenever.
OK, seriously then, why not just require them to wear lab smocks? That way they get to wear their revealing clothes when they go out on break, and before and after work, but are suitably protected while actually working.
Um. Will they fit in a box? I can give you my address and I’ll you know…sort em out for ya.
Yeah. Sort em out.
Yeah.
I’m 19, but I’m pretty sure I’m 15 years older than all world Debbies combined, especially Lab Debbies who wear flip-flops every single time to lab and the male lab professors keep warning them they better come in with real shoes next time but they’ll never actually do anything about it because they want to ogle.
Some Lab Debbies try to get me to give them the answers on quizzes or tests by wearing low-cut tops and affecting a sweet “I might have sex with you” voice. I turn the tables on them: I make them buy me lunch first and then I finish the final and leave before they can get anything copied down. Oooops!
I must note here, as much as I loathe Lab Debbies, that I have a friend who works in the school chemistry lab (but is most decidedly not a Debbie–she has thick, dark dreadlocks, in fact) and listens to her iPod the whole time because the woman who runs the lab plays awful music and refuses to change it to something everyone (including her) will like.
And the status of working/studying in a chemical lab confers the need to wear real shoes so that you don’t put your teachers’/supervisors’ asses on the line when you spill something.
Maven, if I’m ever in your area I have to take you out, lunch or dinner. Your choice, my treat.
In my college, lab attire was defined as: “protective clothing plus coat and googles. Protective clothing: full length jeans, no skirts, full no-slip shoes, sports shoes are good, no sandals, no makeup, no jewelry, keep your watch in your pocket, keep your hair pulled back if it’s not real short. Yes it gets hot around April, if you want to be in a cool place leave college and get a job selling fish. If you need graduation, get glasses small enough to fit inside the googles or large enough to double as googles; must be safety glass; absolutely no contacts.”
As a TA teaching Organic Chem lab in another school, I requested that the university add “no makeup” to the safety policies and had to bar several students from entry for absolutely unsafe clothing. The one I remember most fondly wasn’t even my student, but she came to the lab in high tied-up stilettos, two-half-moons black patent leather shorts with midriff showing and matching push-up top.
A few years ago in a chemical factory we got a visiting engineer who liked to wear short skirts and flip-flops, which were starting to be seen as daily attire and not just “something for the beach”. Management didn’t say anything because she was a visitor - I fobbed one of the shift managers on her by the simple method of saying “oh, someone was asking for ‘miss flip-flops’, I think he must have been wanting you”. The shift manager heard me and hopped over, saying “oh, by the way, isn’t people in the lab supposed to wear safety shoes, a coat and googles?” One of his choicest lines was “ma’am, if you break your neck because you’re wearing inadequate shoes outside the factory, it’s your problem. If you break it here, it’s our problem. If one of my guys breaks his neck because he’s staring at your legs, which are very nice legs but shouldn’t be in sight, it’s your problem again” (this with a grin that included 3 or 4 rows of teeth and some large men in a dark alley).
She broke her ankle a few days later, but it was walking down the street. Her problem 
Cool! 
(Some of my co-workers were in Spain a couple of months ago for a conference. Maybe you were there as well?)
From my years of research experience:
Always wear good, solid shoes.
I work with mice primarily. Part of my training was to give female mice a hormone injection that makes them superovulate (produce lots of eggs). I once dropped the syringe and it landed in my foot! :eek: Went right through my shoe, sock and into my toe. The plunger didn’t depress, but I was celebate for a few weeks until I was positive that I didn’t get dosed.
Wear sensible clothing.
Jeans and a t-shirt that covers your torso are fine. Don’t wear anything you don’t want to get stained. Money is tight, so we can’t afford lab coats for everybody. I have spilled acids, several types of alcohol, and other reagents. Animals + chemicals = lots of spill potential.
Be sensible and think of others.
This seems to be the hardest one to get students to follow. As a rule, I don’t allow a stereo in the lab. I’m not trying to be a hard ass; there are many different people in the lab with different tastes and values. I don’t want conflict over one person’s art being another person’s noise. Funding and grants are hard to get, there are deadlines to meet and inspections of all sorts. This translates into a lot of stress. Please pick up after yourself and stay out of areas you don’t belong in.
I’m pretty sure that you were just whooshed there.
How about a syllabus for the lab experience that specified a 10% total grade reduction for each failure to dress to code?
Dr. “I can hear your mosquito ring tone” Shoshana
I imagine it would have been real embarrassing to have to explain why you were superovulating mice eggs and all.
There’s always the “show & tell” method. Take a random lump o’ cheap meat. Show them what happens to the meat when something they’re working with gets on it. Repeat as necessary. For lil’ miss flip-flops, shove random lump o’ cheap meat into cheap flip-flop and drop something on it, point down or heavily, as needed.
Sooner or later, the light (had better) dawn.
Setting: A classroom with 30 or so seats filled with 5 year old children with Micky Mouse ears.
“Everyone settle down! Sit down, NOW! I’m looking at you bill_eric_sarah_whomever. Ok. Some of you are asking about where you came from. A few years ago, Mommy did some very special work. . .”
I’m visualizing Stuart Little here. 
Mouse_Maven, do these lasses put food in the lab fridge also? When my wife was a bio grad student, that was the big sin. Back then there didn’t seem to be a clothing issue. I realize one of these people doesn’t eat, but still.
That’d work for me.
OK, I overlooked that aspect, but wouldn’t smocks still serve to cover up the midriffs?
No, I’m pretty sure that’s not the case. Spilling the wrong chemicals on exposed skin can definitely be problematic. I was once trying to grow some sort of crystal in a junior HS lab, and got something on my fingers, and they were stained purplish black for days.
Yeah. We get lots of summer students, high school interns, etc. who want to go to med school. I have a simple predictive algorithm: mouse dissection. If they lean in close and say “hey, cool, is that the gall bladder?”, they’re potential premed material. The ones who back off and say “ewww” have a beautiful future in patent law.
JRB
Stuart Little has always troubled me. Even at 7, I knew that, quite aside from the interspecies issues (suggesting that Mr Little was not Stuart’s bio father) (don’t be bringing up recessive genes, you hear me?), something like 12 or 20 baby mice could fit in a tablespoon, and I was troubled by the idea that a newborn mouse would be so small that you wouldn’t even know you’d given birth. Perhaps this is why today I am a psychologist, not a mouse chemist.
Was I the only one who read “random lump o’ cheap meat” to be referring to one of the students?
I expect they’d at least insist on dinner, first. Except for
who can probably be bought for a nice crunchy stalk of celery.
For the good of humanity, you MUST kill them off. Either by snipping off their annoying little heads, or arranging for “lab accidents” to happen. Do it NOW, before they breed.