Damn it.

If there is ever a situation that deserves yelling "Damn it!", "Hell!", "Fucking hell!", etc. I have just seen it.

Merrily transferring our fruit flies away, my labmate asks the head of the lab to look at some flies. She had noticed that they didn't look as expected.

The stock was contaminated. To the extreme. Out of approx. 350 vials, 7 were uncontaminated. That means every single experiment done with this stock since the start of the summer, the last time they were known to be uncontaminated for sure, is now in the garbage bin. I am personally lucky in that I had not done any. But the entire summer's work of my labmate is essentially gone.

Damn it indeed.

Bad idea

Drinking 4 L of water and 3 cups of coffee is a bad idea. Enough said.

I waited 6 weeks for 17 vials of dead fruit flies

To conduct my thesis work I require some specific strains of transgenic Drosophila (fruit flies for the less scientifically inclined). These strains were coming from a stock centre in Vienna, Austria. Now, for some dumbass reason, the centre only maintains 1 vial of each line, and breed up a 2nd when someone orders a vial of that line. Because of this, the time from order to shipping is 6-8 weeks. I was lucky that it only took 6 weeks in my case. Four more days in transit and they finally arrive today.

They were all dead.

I waited 6 f-ing weeks so I could finally start real work towards getting my thesis completed. And I get 17 vials with not a single live fly between them. Perhaps some idiot neglected the "store at room temperature" and "this side up" stickers, or maybe nuked them with some x-rays as one of the labels tends to indicate. All I know is that I hope there is some viable larvae left that emerge soon, or else I am going to be VERY cranky. Not to mention bored for the next 6-8 weeks.

I have decided to sell my soul

Retail work is evil. Plain and simple. But frankly, commission pays well. And as we all know, an education is expensive.

Thus, on that note, I have decided to return to my previous part-time job in electronics retail. I shall not name names of stores, since the job does pay well.

Expect random rants in the months to come.

The beginning, as written at 2:00 in the morning

Insomnia sucks.

It really does. I have decided to start writing a blog at approx. 2 AM because I have already taken the maximum allowed dose of sleep aids and still can't fall asleep. So I have lots of time to kill. Enough time in fact, that I spent 5 minutes searching for an alternate to "sucks" in that first sentence. I even tried three different thesauruses, but nothing was better than suck. "Is very terrible" just doesn't have the same gratification as you get from "sucks".

This blog will be random in the extreme. It will have digressions. Most of it will be on stuff that interests science geeks like myself. If you have a problem with that than you can take that problem and stuff it somewhere uncomfortable. I really don't care where as long as it makes you irritable. That would be sufficiently satisfying to me.