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There are good days.
And then there are bad days.
And THEN there are the exceptionally bad days.
Like today.
Spent the morning being hardworking and finally transferring all the stuff I wrote on lose sheets of paper onto my lab notebook proper. Well most of it anyway.
And then was reading and trying to figure out how to do this assay called picogreen. Cute name huh? Which turns out to be not too terribly difficult to do... but somehow I was a little nervous that something would go wrong.
Ok. So as I was sitting at my desk after lunch, guy from the other project comes and tells me he needs me to do that stuff we did two days ago. I say ok, later in the afternoon then. Like when I'm running my qpcr.
But what happened in the end was I totally screwed up on the assay... because I messed up the standards. I calculated the dilution for the standards with a 'diluted stock solution'. The standard solution I picked up from the fridge was an 'undiluted stock solution'. Great. Repeated it twice and have no idea why my standards were messed up. Asked. Great. I just used a concentration like 125x more than required. GRRRREEEAT. Just how much reagent have I wasted? To make matters worst, I didn't cap a tube properly and it leaked. Like a lot. Most of it. Even more reagent wasted. And crap in my rush I didn't prepare more of the dilution though I promised myself to. So did it a third time. Wasted over an hour... the whole thing took me close to 2 hours to finish, to finally get that miserable few values that I should have gotten long ago.
No time for qpcr anymore.
Do the stuff for the other guy/group. Easy enough. But I didn't cap centrifuge (a plastic cover thing inside) before closing the lid (that's the outside lid, so it's a double lid. Lid inside is removable, so I forgot, lid outside is on a hinge, MUST be closed to run), only realized after hitting the start button... ok. I always do that on other centrifuges and it turned out fine. No biggie... Except that for reasons I could not forlorn, one of the centrifuge tube broke. Like at the neck. Not just the cap breaking off, but the whole top part of the entire tube... and to use tweezers to take it out. Thankfully the thing can still be capped though, and had to be rinsed anyway... so add buffer, mix, pipette out to new tube... still. Not a good day.
*shakes head*
I got asked to run some qpcr for some samples too. No idea what the samples will be like... most likely have to do dna extraction too... which could well be a problem since I only know the automated dna extraction, and not the manual way with different reagents favoured by most people in the lab.
Sigh. At least the picogreen results seem to be alright. It was within the expected values.
And not running the qpcr today might not have been THAT bad after all, because I just was given more samples to run, and it fits into the 2nd plate of what I would have been running today. So I'll still have two plates to run tmr...
And there's octavia and J who's always so quick to cheer me up with random Arashi photos. Love you girls.
I guess it wasn't such a bad day after all...
And then there are bad days.
And THEN there are the exceptionally bad days.
Like today.
Spent the morning being hardworking and finally transferring all the stuff I wrote on lose sheets of paper onto my lab notebook proper. Well most of it anyway.
And then was reading and trying to figure out how to do this assay called picogreen. Cute name huh? Which turns out to be not too terribly difficult to do... but somehow I was a little nervous that something would go wrong.
Ok. So as I was sitting at my desk after lunch, guy from the other project comes and tells me he needs me to do that stuff we did two days ago. I say ok, later in the afternoon then. Like when I'm running my qpcr.
But what happened in the end was I totally screwed up on the assay... because I messed up the standards. I calculated the dilution for the standards with a 'diluted stock solution'. The standard solution I picked up from the fridge was an 'undiluted stock solution'. Great. Repeated it twice and have no idea why my standards were messed up. Asked. Great. I just used a concentration like 125x more than required. GRRRREEEAT. Just how much reagent have I wasted? To make matters worst, I didn't cap a tube properly and it leaked. Like a lot. Most of it. Even more reagent wasted. And crap in my rush I didn't prepare more of the dilution though I promised myself to. So did it a third time. Wasted over an hour... the whole thing took me close to 2 hours to finish, to finally get that miserable few values that I should have gotten long ago.
No time for qpcr anymore.
Do the stuff for the other guy/group. Easy enough. But I didn't cap centrifuge (a plastic cover thing inside) before closing the lid (that's the outside lid, so it's a double lid. Lid inside is removable, so I forgot, lid outside is on a hinge, MUST be closed to run), only realized after hitting the start button... ok. I always do that on other centrifuges and it turned out fine. No biggie... Except that for reasons I could not forlorn, one of the centrifuge tube broke. Like at the neck. Not just the cap breaking off, but the whole top part of the entire tube... and to use tweezers to take it out. Thankfully the thing can still be capped though, and had to be rinsed anyway... so add buffer, mix, pipette out to new tube... still. Not a good day.
*shakes head*
I got asked to run some qpcr for some samples too. No idea what the samples will be like... most likely have to do dna extraction too... which could well be a problem since I only know the automated dna extraction, and not the manual way with different reagents favoured by most people in the lab.
Sigh. At least the picogreen results seem to be alright. It was within the expected values.
And not running the qpcr today might not have been THAT bad after all, because I just was given more samples to run, and it fits into the 2nd plate of what I would have been running today. So I'll still have two plates to run tmr...
And there's octavia and J who's always so quick to cheer me up with random Arashi photos. Love you girls.
I guess it wasn't such a bad day after all...
