What do you expect me to do about it!?

The BBQ Pit
1

Ok, little update in CRorex land.

2 weeks ago the other technician where I work left.

This means I have to do both of our jobs. Which isn’t too bad, I finally have enough work for almost a full day.

There are some problems however.

The other tech did the purchasing for our lab. Thats right folks, every reagent, every bottle of media, every plastic tube, pipete tip etc was purchased by the other guy.

Now its up to me.

But wait, I got trained about how to buy stuff.

But like all of my training in my life, it was 5 min long and made no sense.

So now my boss and the other people who still work here (I guess they still do, I’ve seen 2 people in the last 2 weeks) leave me notes about stuff they need me to buy.

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGG

I don’t know what the hell I"M DOING! WTF!? You need .5 mL tubes. Ok, I understand that. I know what they are.

BUT THERE ARE 37 CATALOG LISTINGS FOR .5 mL TUBES! Silicone sealed? DNAse/RNAse free? Sterile? One hand open tubes? Interlocking cap, self sealing cap?

How many do you want?! HUH?! I don’t know how many to buy! HELL I don’t even know how much money I have to spend each month!!! Do I go cheap? Or do I go all the bells and whistles expensive.

Nobody tells me these things. I get purchase orders like, “Don’t buy what we did last time”.

WHAT THE HELL DID WE BUY LAST TIME?! I’ve been doing this all of 2 MOTHER FUCKING WEEKS!

Is this knowledge supposed to already be in my head?! Did I miss a brainwashing session!? W T F!

Oh sure, I could go look at the copies we keep of stuff we’ve ordered.

BUT THATS 4 YEARS WORTH OF PURCHASES! NONE OF THEM IN ORDER! Its 5 4inch notebooks worth!

So back to these tubes. I FINALLY figure out what the hell we ordered. So I order more. Now I’m not sure how many we need, so I get 2 boxes (2,000 of the little plastic tubes). Then my boss says, I don’t want those!

THEN WHY THE HOLY FUCK DIDN"T YOU SAY SO! You said get more tubes! Its what we ordered last time!

OMG its happening again! This is just like the -80 C freezer incident. (a month ago we had one of our -80 C storage freezers go on the fritz, it his -06 C. This is a BAD thing. So I pull the stuff out of it and tell me boss. He says, “Get someone out to fix it, but not the people who do the yearly inspections.” Great, we only have 1 number of techs to call about the freezers, the same guys he doesn’t want me to call. WHEE! So after 2 days I dig up a phone number, and they send someone out. This guy fit the NY plumber stereotype to a T, except for the accent. Grubby shirt, pants, big mustasch, and LOTS of body hair. And ass hair, lots and lots of ass hair. With hip hugger jeans, and LOTS of bending over. And ass waving. Long story short, he things the problem is with loose wires on the circut board. So he lies down on the ground, unscrews the cover and takes a pair of needle nose pliers and starts poking around. Did I mention that the transformer for the freezer is next to the circut board? Transformer + metal pliers + guy holding pliers lying on the ground = fried guy. Yep, a TRUE Darwin Award Honoree! Well he blew the circut, which the OTHER FREEZERS WERE ON! But it was all eventually fixed.)

Back to the tubes.

So I figure out exactly what he wants. He wants clean tubes, but not a box with a bag of 1000 tubes. He wants a box of 1000 with 10 bags of 100 tubes in it.

Nobody sells that.

Nobody remembers selling that since they invented PCR.

I’m supposed to buy that.

I could just cry.
Next problem, the very next day. JOY IS ME!

We get blood shipments from the primate center in < I bet you want to know>. They have the species of primate we use for our experiments. So each week for the last 14 weeks I’ve been getting 80 mls of blood. I then take the blood and isolate the white blood cells, then seperate them into 3 different populations. Its long, and stressful. I have to work in the BSL 3, since the monkeys can carry Herpes B virus (lethal to humans) and it takes 4-5 hrs.

The blood comes < I bet you guys want to know :slight_smile: >.

The blood SHOULD have biohazzard stickers up the wazoo.

They used to ship it that way! NOT ANYMORE!

The blood used to come in a big box, with absorbant padding around the smaller box inside, with a large bag, with a smaller bag inside, wrapped in absorbant padding with a small ziplock bag w/ my blood in it.

NOW IT COMES IN A FREAKING SNO GLOBE BOX, NO STICKERS, NO PADDING, AND ONLY ONE FREAKING BAG!

HELLO!?!?!? BIOCONTAINMENT ISSUES YOU STUPID MONKEY SQUICKERS!?
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGG

And guess what. Since its comming in the new smaller box… SHIPPING AND RECIEVING HAS NO CLUE WHAT TO LOOK FOR!

The blood comes in at 9:25 each week.

THEY LOST THE LAST 2 SHIPMENTS! FOR 5 MOTHERFUCKING HOURS!

IN THE TEXAS HEAT!

YOU THINK THAT BLOOD IS STILL GOOD?! YOU KNOW HOW FUCKING MUCH THAT COSTS!? Each shipment worth what I get paid in 2 weeks.

And somehow them loosing the blood is MY FAULT!

WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO!

I went there and asked, has the blood come in yet? (at 10am) I waited until they did their morning deliveries (11am) still no blood I ask again. They haven’t seen the package. At 1pm I go back there and ask, are you sure you haven’t seen it? Then I get the tracking number from then. 2 pm SHIPPING CALLS BACK ASKING IF I WANT TO HELP LOOK FOR THE BOX, THEY MAY HAVE IT!
ARRRRRRRGGGGGG

Sigh

This sucks

2

They’ve lost blood that is possibly infected and not marked as a biohazzard.

I’m frightened by this.

I bet you’re glad you’re leaving Austin, eh Freyr?

3

This is exactly like the first job I had right out of college (ran a PCR/sequencing/vaccine lab - even did the purchasing). Do you use Fisher? Do you know the rep? They can be a great help when you first take over the ordering of consumables. The other thing is to make damn sure you keep the records in order to make it easier in the future and avoid the “not what we ordered last time” crap. It sounds like the guy before you dropped the ball on that one. Good records will also keep you from hunting through catalogs every time.

I had a post-doc who was never happy with what I ordered for her. Finally I gave up. I got another catalog from Fisher and gave it to her. I showed her where all the other catalogs were. I told her to just pick it out, write down the item number, and I’ll call it in with the rest of the stuff. She still bitched about getting the wrong stuff, but now I could tell her “Hey, don’t bitch at me, you picked it out.” You may or may not be able to do that.

At any rate, I sympathise. I even had to deal with a broken -80 freezer. In my case, however, it was sabotage. Fucking sabotage! A post-doc broke the thing on purpose in order to ruin another’s experiment. Post-docs. Un-fucking-believable.

4

It sounds like what you need to do in respect to the first problem is simply take charge. Make a form for supply requests that includes a line for everything you need order the item—quantity, supplier, size, stock number, who wants 'em, when they want 'em . . . Distribute a stack of 'em to everybody requesting stuff and tell 'em you get their stuff to 'em faster (and more accurately) if they’ll only fill out this little slip of paper. The trick here is make it look beneficial to these guys to use your system; ramming it down their throats by saying “Fill this out or you can’t have it,” won’t work.

Instead of looking at this as a problem, look at it as an opportunity to show your initiative, your organizational and communication skills. This will be something you can point to sometime down the road during a performance evaluation. You can say, “Look what I did with our supply request and purchasing stuff. It’s one damned smooth runnin’ machine since I took over it.” And the best part of this is you’ll get to do things your way. Relieves the frustration and makes you look good in the process.

Granted you may not want to be a stock clerk and I certainly can’t blame ya there, but there will always* be aspects of a job that you won’t enjoy. And a smooth, documented, streamlined process is gonna be easier to hand off to some other chump, like the guy they hire to work with you someday.

5

UncleBeer speaks wise words. Heed them.

Until you get the supply process whupped into shape, you’ll need to vent here, I suppose. You do a nice line in rants, by the way.

6

I didn’t explain the situation right.

I have books of stuff we’ve ordered in the past.
I have a folder with 300 files of stuff we’ve ordered in the past.
I have a rolodex FILLED with rep cards and very carefully filled out cards with the products we order, their catalog number and the most recent price on them.

So basically, what UncleBeer explained is already set up, in the computer in my roladex and stored in notebooks.

My problem is my boss or the grad student comes in and says, “We need this, we’ve never ordered it before” and gives me a printed up web page. “Oh yeah don’t forget we need isotype control.”

Isotype control??? Its a list of freaking Goat anti Mouse Secondary antibodies! (FACS staining) (Oh yeah and we’re switching companies …)

Or my favorite, which is whats happening now, “We buy this stuff once every 3 years, and what we got last time I don’t like. Get something else.”

I can take care of ordering more kits, and more of the things we already have. Its just when I’m ordering something never ordered before so I have no records to guide me that I freak out.

Lord, let us not go into the whole random decision to change the company we ship everything out of the lab with.

The only way to improve the way we keep records and ship stuff would be to computerize the whole thing. And I’m talking scanned in copies of invoices, cross referenced with a HTML page by date and product and all set up in a searchable index.

Thats what makes it so damn fustrating. The day to day equipment and reagents are already index and catagorized. Hell, we even have the day when the quotes expire written in for each item. The problem is we’re doing a whole new set of experiments we’ve never been set up to do. Then add in the new equipment purchases.

Then I also have to deal with the mess the person before me made with the purchasing department. He managed to piss off everyone in there so nobody wants to help anyone calling from this lab. And nobody ever told me that for some items I have to call and get preapprovial of a purchase order, other things I don’t. And if I do it the wrong way (fill out the PO and fax it to purchasing department when I should have called and gotten a PO number, then filled out the form THEN fax it, I get it faxed back to me with a NASTY note on it…)

Sigh, I just got this…

DNA Endo-free maxi prep.
1 kit.
–(huge bold letters) 10 TIPS!

It doesn’t appear in the catalog. Their tech line says it comes with 10 tips. Does this mean I need 10 additional tips? Or make sure I order the kit that has 10 tips? AND THE PERSON ALREADY LEFT FOR THE DAY!

AAAAARRRRRRGGGGG

I AM NOT THE OTHER TECHNICIAN! I DON"T KNOW WHAT ANY OF THIS MEANS!

7

Look you can rant and bitch later, right now I need 1000 0.5 ml flux chargers. :smiley:

[sub]sorry I had to be the first to do this to you[/sub]

8

AAAAARRRRRRGGGG

Its happened again!

This time we’re getting billed for 9 DNA samples we sent to be sequenced when we only sent out 3?!

How am I supposed to know if we sent out 3 or 9!? The paper work says 3, but I DIDN"T SEND IT, I DIDN’T GET IT, I DIDN’T EVEN SEE THE BLOODY SAMPLES GO OUT OR THE SEQUENCES COME IN!

9

You want a cookie? I have some cookies.

10

And some nice hot tea. :slight_smile:

I feel for you…it is hard when you are starting out taking over for someone, and everybody thinks you know everything you need to know, but you only know some of it. Then, when you do really well on the stuff you do know, they assume that you’ll do great on the other stuff and can’t see why you don’t.

I hope things get easier for ya. I predict they will. But yeah, it does suck!

11

Actually, what I need is two days off.

Its like a weekend, but where I don’t have to come into work.

12

What the hell is this thing called ‘a weekend’ you speak of?