{"id":3798,"date":"2016-06-28T20:30:03","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T19:30:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/?p=3798"},"modified":"2016-06-28T21:28:59","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T20:28:59","slug":"in-which-i-snap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2016\/06\/28\/in-which-i-snap\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I snap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a data-flickr-embed=\"true\"  href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/lablit\/27930492826\/in\/dateposted-public\/\" title=\"OCD Antibody Box\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/c3.staticflickr.com\/8\/7308\/27930492826_7c5649a5b8.jpg\" width=\"500\" height=\"375\" alt=\"OCD Antibody Box\"><\/a><script async src=\"\/\/embedr.flickr.com\/assets\/client-code.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not a neat freak or anything, at home or in the lab, but sometimes, enough is enough. Behold the new arrangement of our lab&#8217;s stash of fluorochrome-conjugated secondary antibodies. Is it not a thing of beauty?<\/p>\n<p>(<em>A moment of silence to admire said new arrangement.<\/em>)<\/p>\n<p>It goes without saying that if I catch anyone filing them back in the wrong slot, they&#8217;re toast.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve spent far too many hours of my life digging through box after box of identical-looking tubes: pulling them out, squinting at the unintelligible labels, putting them back, checking out the next one. Repeat ten million times. I&#8217;ve been in labs where the tubes were all labelled in Chinese; or were missing the concentration; or whose pen marks had long since rubbed off altogether, but people in the know recognized what they were by distinctive nicks in the lid or smudge marks on the side. I&#8217;ve contracted frostbite going through hundreds of snow-covered boxes in the back of the -80 freezer, untouched by human hands since the early Pleistocene. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s getting pretty bad in our communal cold spaces. I think this is a predictable outcome when a lab starts out very small (one person doing experiments, who knows where everything is because it&#8217;s all his) and expands organically.<\/p>\n<p>After my last experimental foray, when it took me two hours to find the red phalloidin, I am almost, but not quite, thinking about a bar coding system. Can someone please shoot me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not a neat freak or anything, at home or in the lab, but sometimes, enough is enough. Behold the new arrangement of our lab&#8217;s stash of fluorochrome-conjugated secondary antibodies. Is it not a thing of beauty? (A moment of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2016\/06\/28\/in-which-i-snap\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,34,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","category-scientific-thinking","category-silliness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3798\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}