(no subject)

[kalibex]

I shouldn't have declared that I only screwed up at work once in a great while - I just did it again.

This time I must have lost cells during the processing of a 96-well plate - When I finished part of a certain procedure, FACS staining, there were some left, but only a mere fraction of what I started out with - enough for what will be done to them next?

F*ck, I hope so, since it's the last experiment so that a paper can be finished, and my boss made a point of asking me to do that procedure as she was having a horrible day, making mistakes, and joked that she shouldn't have gotten out of bed! So she passed it to me...

...and I screwed it up instead. F*cking go me. Maybe partly because I was late for my 2nd job - she'd handed this off to me about 3:30, kind of late...when I realized I'd be late, I let the other job know, but still was under time pressure to not be too teribly late, you know? Worried about catching a bus, etc. I must not have checked the plate after one spin - didn't help that I found out the centrifuge wasn't even working properly; the door was sticking and it may not have spun, with me assuming it did (I swear I always check the plate for pellets, but I must have flaked out and not checked THIS ONE TIME! Or else I saw condensation and mistakenly thought it was a cell pellet - I automatically check, I do! I know it's important not to lose cells. But I somehow must have flicked most of the cells away! NEVER HAVING DONE THAT PARTICULAR MISTAKE BEFORE!

F*CK!

Okay; it isn't the end of the world; maybe there'll be enough. Maybe. I'll know tomorrow.

Another person working with my boss today lost 3 weeks of work when this Idiot tossed the cells she'd just painstakenly collected, thinking they were his BL2 waste.

Three weeks of her work (some of the best cells she'd gotten to date), gone in a careless instant. In my case, a collection of cells of which we have no more (of that specific type at the moment), possibly mostly tossed in the sink by accident, and maybe holding up a paper my boss badly wants published - in a moment.

What did I 'learn' from this? What did she learn from this? That shit happens? In my case, that with two jobs and extra stress due to my current crap time management, this is the price I get for serving too many masters?

Oh, f*cking hurray.

Thanks, Reality.

Oh, and

f*ck you

, Reality.

Comments

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

It's good that you have a boss who acknowledges her own ability to make mistakes. I think it will turn out okay.

[timjr.livejournal.com]

::big hug::

I hate bad days.

Bad days can go -*(Data lost in transfer)*-

Yeah, you hear that bad days? Yeah, I thought so.

[warinbabylon.livejournal.com]

Hang in there. It'll all work out. The boss was making mistakes too, she said.

[kalibex.livejournal.com]

I know - but the whole point is, she gave them to me so it'd get done. The last bit of data needed to satisfy the reviewers at a major journal so it can be published. Using cells that yeah, take a month to grow and collect, and don't always develop correctly.

How many mistakes can I make, before I'm perceived as Incompetent?

By the time you find out...too late; you're already well-labled.

Plus, I told her way back that if my other job and this main one conflicted...I'd give up the other one. She's actually been pretty good about not going out of her way to knowingly schedule stuff that might put me in the sort of time pressure I was under yesterday afternoon - she's been over-all very accomodating; I think she just forgot I had to be at my other job that night. And no, I wasn't going to go out of may way to remind her of my extremely full schedule and that potential conflict. I certainly wasn't going to beg off fulfilling her request.

I was an hour late to my class on Tuesday night; I was an hour late to my 2nd job last night, because 'the main job comes first', my own policy.

And yesterday's time pressure wasn't even my 'own fault' (ie, it wasn't that I got going on the procedures too late; it wasn't due to crap time management - in this case, she handed it off to me late afternoon - except maybe I could have been more efficient about it. Somehow.)

All that trouble...and I probably don't even have a successful staining (enough cells to comfortably count) to show for it.

In the end, it could be said it's my fault for having two f*cking jobs and trying to do too much, like an Idiot.

[warinbabylon.livejournal.com]

Then I'll just add HUGS. Sound off when you need to. I can understand the frustration at self and otherwise...I've been there before as well.