vegetal

[opabinia]

Time. Time is here. I have time to do something. I can clean the bathroom. I can sift through another of my countless as-yet-unpacked boxes. I can find my razor heads, so I don't have to shave with the same blade for the ninth time ow. But I'm tired. I froze Carl-Sagan-like quantities of MooCow cells today, which was a pleasure (though a monotonous one) after disassembling and bleaching out the laminar flow hood.

Yes, Cytomegalovirus showed up in a couple of cultures. Can't get rid of that with Ethanol -- just makes them drunk, which, naturally, makes them want to fuck, and so you just end up with more.. Wait, I wandered off. No, Ethanol won't kill them. You need Sodium Hypochlorite to denature their asses.

Yes, and taking one hood apart and bleaching it will do exactly dick to stop the problem. "Boss," I says, "cleaning one thing at a time probably won't get rid of this. Whatever it's on now will just spread it back around. If you want to be sure, you have to get rid of all the cells and sterilize everything." She was silent, which meant "Yes I know. Don't say that again, please. Just... bleach the hood or something." So I bleached the hood. That's okay -- less work for me, and I'd be pissed if I had to throw out all those cells after isolating them from a big, bloody, fat-choked pulmonary artery. I'd rather bleach the hood and watch the CMV persist, so long as it persists in other people's plates, and not mine. That's why I like the Bunsen burner.

I really wandered off. All I really wanted to write was: I have time to do productive things right now, but I'm tired, and I really only feel like laying back and maybe reading. Writing is a stretch. Man, I'm tired of typing. My resume is ready to spray as it is, anyway.

Comments

[sheepzeit.livejournal.com]

How often do you bleach our your hood? At our lab we only use ethanol and I don't think it gets any kind of bleach-down even for quarterly maintenance because they're worried about corroding the metal.

That scares me.

[lepidosiren.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my boss was out last week. I took it apart and used EtOH then, for fear of corroding anything. Then my boss got back and asked me to bleach it. So I bleached it. I dunno. I just work here.

FYI -- when I started this job, nobody in the lab remembered ever disassembling any of them. Most people didn't know you could take the hoods apart to clean them. They had been in use for years and years and years... Now I just take them apart whenever there's absolutely nothing better to do, every couple of months or so.

[xenoglaux]

My resume is ready to spray as it is, anyway.

spraaaaaay