hello all ... long time no hear ... well.. I am just gonna have a gripe about one eccentric member of our laboratory ...
He is weird ... not that there is anythign wrong with weird but he is out there. We have to call him Blak-M and i think the only colour his clothes come in is black - I still haven't figured out if he is wearing the same pants and t-shirt for the past month ... but that I doubt ...

Anyway, my gripe is that he is SO painfully ANAL about EVERYTHING.

We have certain molecular reagents, buffers and kits that are for COMMUNAL use - for everyone to use, as they are too expensive for everyone to have their own, but no, if he takes an enzyme or a polymerase out of a kit he will put it in his own freezer box and keep it - yesterday I had to tell him not to do that becuase one other student had trouble locating it ... it is a KIT - ie for EVERYONE. It's expensive! Not everyone can have their own! He gave some excuse about how he doesn't want to share stuff becuase he doesn't want to increase the risk of contamination - ok, fair enough but there is a line and there is a line and he has crossed both.

Tip boxes - we fill them - we all wear gloves when we fill them - but he won't use tip boxes that he didn't fill himself, and when we autoclave stuff, we autoclve stuff for everyone - but he will only autoclave stuff for himself! Teamwork here please! There are nine of us!

And don't even get me started on how he disposes of ethidium bromide (it is a nasty chemical that is a carcinogen). Everyone else puts 2-5ul in their gel (before a gel has set, it is a thick liquid - pretend your gel is jelly but it is thicker when setting) but he won't - he will use 200ul, put his gel in a container with water and the ethidium bromide in the water - under the tap with the taps on for 10-15 minutes and the ethidium bromide goes down the sink! Out into the environment! I had a go at him yesterday about this raising my points:

• Wasting water (taps running for up to twenty minutes - we are near water restricitons here)


• ethidium bromide = bad and he is letting it go down the sink. His argument is that it is a minute amount but I said "Yeah to you it might be but if there are a billion people out there who think the same as you and are doing it, it is not such a minute amount after all)


• Increase costs as he uses 20X more ethidium bromide for each gel and plus if he disposes of it in bottles, chemsal takes it away and we pay by weight - water is more volume than gels so we pay more to get rid of it...