{"id":902,"date":"2011-03-14T21:30:24","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T21:30:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/?p=902"},"modified":"2013-01-03T21:57:31","modified_gmt":"2013-01-03T21:57:31","slug":"in-which-i-lose-my-temper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/2011\/03\/14\/in-which-i-lose-my-temper\/","title":{"rendered":"In which I lose my temper"},"content":{"rendered":"

Late last year I blogged about the new health and safety rule<\/a> handed down on high from the research council that funds our institute: all staff must wear safety glasses at all times<\/em> while in the laboratory \u2013 regardless of what they are doing. I won\u2019t rehash my objections here, except to summarize that about 95% of what I do involves transferring non-toxic liquids from one tube to another, and when I do perform something hazardous, like poking around a liquid nitrogen tank or dealing with concentrated sulphuric acid, I wear the appropriate safety gear.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve worked in a number of labs the world over, and I\u2019ve never encountered such a draconian eyewear policy. What, I wondered, could be its impetus? One of my fearless and intrepid colleagues, Ian the Microscope Guy, dug a little deeper and found out<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I looked up the research council\u2019s policy and it explained that there were 12 injuries in 2009 relating to the eye. The breakdown is as follows:<\/p>\n

7 Chemical splashes
\n1 Chemical vapour (formaldehyde)
\n1 liquid nitrogen<\/em><\/p>\n

Then it gets a bit silly\u2026.<\/p>\n

1 Ice from freezer
\n1 plastic fragment (freezer tray)<\/em><\/p>\n

Then it gets REALLY silly\u2026<\/p>\n

1 soap<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, every lab in our building was forced to spend an inordinate amount of time writing up detailed risk assessments for every conceivable manipulation we do in the lab, including what safety gear is required (although handwashing with soap, I\u2019m afraid to say, is not on our lab\u2019s list). And we are all charged by regulations to be familiar with these procedures. It has not escaped my notice that the first nine, non-silly items on the list would have been prevented if people had simply been following the pre-existing rules about wearing goggles at the appropriate time<\/em>. Actually, make that eight: strictly speaking, glasses would not prevent formaldehyde vapor from contacting the eye, so that person should have been working in a fume hood \u2013 another requirement clearly indicated in the risk assessments that seems to have been flouted. <\/p>\n

So will the new rules lead to a reduction in eye injuries? I\u2019m not convinced: risk assessments covering the scenarios that led to these injuries already dictated that care should be taken (either by the manipulators themselves, or nearby bystanders), and it clearly wasn\u2019t \u2013 so wouldn\u2019t these sorts be just as likely to disregard a more wide-sweeping rule? Meanwhile, what sort of havoc could be caused by perpetually restricted peripheral vision? <\/p>\n

One of the most astonishing things about the policy is that the funding body, in order to implement its rule, had to pay for prescription safety specs for every single bespectacled researcher working in one of its funded institutes \u2013 I don\u2019t know the numbers, but I can imagine there must be many hundreds of us. In these times of drastic cutbacks, I really shudder to imagine the final bill, and how many antibodies and enzymes we could have bought with that cash instead.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s no use complaining about it now; the rule has kicked in. This past Friday, after putting it off as long as humanly possible, my benchmate Helen and I trundled down to High Holborn to order our special specs. We were optimistic \u2013 surely these days, the design of such items must have become more fashionable. Maybe we would actually be pleasantly surprised.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But our hearts sank when the clerk pulled out the box of samples, about a dozen models in all and each of them utterly hideous. Matters got worse when it became clear that most of the models were off-limits to people as myopic as me (R:-13.00\/-0.75×2\u00b0; L:-11.00\/-1.00×5\u00b0, since you ask) or my colleague (slightly less bad but still over the limit). Matters got a bit more worse when the clerk warned us the lenses might be an inch thick for people like us. When I finally had chosen the least hideous of the two possible pairs on offer, I was then informed that as my prescription was more than a year old, I\u2019d need to be retested.<\/p>\n

Dear reader, I lost my temper. For starters, I can assure you that anyone with a prescription of R:-13.00\/-0.75×2\u00b0; L:-11.00\/-1.00×5\u00b0 is never going to get a decent assessment from a high street optician. After about two decades of being unable to see and not knowing why, I’d finally sucked it in and paid \u00a3300\/hour to a Harley Street consultant ophthalmic surgeon with a posh accent and a natty bow-tie who, after two<\/em> sessions, was finally able to prescribe glasses through which I can actually see<\/em>. I was not about to spend the research council\u2019s hard-earned, taxpayer\u2019s cash on safety specs that I couldn\u2019t focus through, and I certainly wasn\u2019t going to go back to Harley Street until I felt I needed a change. It didn\u2019t matter how hard I tried to convince the clerk that my current glasses prescription gives me 20\/20 vision. The bottom line was that it\u2019s against the optician\u2019s health and safety regulations to fill spectacle prescriptions more than twelve months old \u2013 no matter what the customer wants. The final scores? That\u2019s Lab Health and Safety 1, Optician Health and Safety 1, Jenny, nil.<\/p>\n

So if you ever visit my lab in the afternoons, which is when I usually have to remove my contact lenses out of fatigue, I\u2019ll be the one with the glasses over glasses, messing up my experiments because every time I look down, the outer safely specs slip off my nose and fall all over my rack, splashing solutions everywhere. <\/p>\n

But don\u2019t worry about my skin \u2013 I\u2019ll be wearing the white coat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Late last year I blogged about the new health and safety rule handed down on high from the research council that funds our institute: all staff must wear safety glasses at all times while in the laboratory \u2013 regardless of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-and-safety-gone-mad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","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=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/mindthegap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}