Ugh, I'm a glorified maid.

Yesterday, we discovered another cell line to be contaminated--severely--when we were trying to figure out why some results we got on an Ab test were so poor. Turns out this cell line is in the same incubator as the other one that I lost while my boss was on vacation (she returned yesterday in time for this new disaster). So, while contamination of the dishes was still my fault (which she somehow never fails to make known), the incubator may actually be a risk I was not prepared for (however, in my boss' speak, the contamination of the incubator is my fault--implicitly, though, which I guess counts for her version of restraint).

So, I need to autoclave the shelves and the water dish, which is no big. First, wash them with the extra-strength cleaner (akin to what Rob got from his mom, it's too dangerous for bare hands), dry thoroughly, then ethanol the crap out of them. Then autoclave. Next, the big project: the incubator itself. This wouldn't be so bad if I could take all day on it, but I was not able to turn off the gas to the one incubator without turning it off to both. I could move whoever's stuff is in the second one, but I doubt I could communicate this to the Chinese guy who is an all-around clean-up guy.

(side note: that's right, the guy they trust to make sterile solutions, have the keys to all the rooms, check the hoods and incubators, and take out the trash, speaks only halting English and tried to give me a red garbage bag when I asked for soap. ::groans:: I'm amazed I managed to procure the keys off him for the autoclave room.)

Knee-deep in incubator, gas still on, I'm inhaling strong chemical cleaner fumes for about ten minutes, then rinsing, rinsing, rinsing as best I can with wetted towels ('cause you can't use water cascades like at the sink), and then comes the ethanol. Which has now certainly singed my soft tracheal tissues because I can feel a sore patch along my airway when I breathe. God, it burned, and I had to get it done fast and with my nose in the incubator to reach the back.

With my luck, my boss will come back and say she wanted to clean the incubator out herself, thus denigrating my efforts and giving me serious, unneeded injuries, or complications at the very least, for no reason. Look for me on the news, I may just commit homicide. I was never the type to commit suicide, so I'll take her out instead.

It's just no good to say "I don't know" with this woman

So, while my boss did not redo my efforts to clean the incubator, she has not exactly been...how shall I put this? Let me pretend for just one moment that I am her. I will state things as I see them with her blunt rudeness and patronizing airs. Basically, she is a worthless human being because she cannot convey useful information and criticisms THAT NEED TO BE MADE (see, being honest) without making a point of acting incredulous at how stupid the person being corrected is for not knowing something or for making a mistake. No, sorry, I can't do it. I can't be as unfailingly rude as she manages to be on a daily basis, and this is really only the second day she's been back.

As part of my boss' crusade against contamination, she has determined the following avenues for contamination must be cleansed: the hot water bath, the incubator, and me. The second I've taken care of for now, but the first and third are proving to be, in my boss' estimation, too wily and ignorant, respectively, to be tamed. I put some sera we got today in the hot water bath so that it could thaw and I could aliquot it. Half an hour later, around when the things would be thawed, she asks me about what I did with them. I answer truthfully and say I put them in the bath.

Big mistake.

Karima: You did what? After I told you yesterday that it was dirty?
me: Uh, but I thought you said you cleaned it.
Karima: (looking astounded and affronted) Me? Clean?

I am not shitting you, that is exactly what she said. Cleaning is beneath her forever, it seems. So whatever it was she did yesterday, when she disappeared with cleaning stuff for half an hour, it was *not* cleaning the hot water bath. Okay, I admit my own culpability here: I didn't check the bath carefully when I put my sera in to thaw. I go to retrieve them only to get another lecture from the holier-than-thou Karima about how my efforts to sterilize the outsides are now merely making the problem worse. Apparently, wiping the bottles down with 70% ethanol is not a sure protectant against contaminants. Funny that, seeing as I've wiped everything with it since I started as I was told to do!!! (I was also told precisely the opposite--that cleaning with 70% ethanol was a pretty good way at getting rid of the microscopic beasties on my bottles)

Now, she's saying she'll show me how to clean them. She's also gone ahead and stooped below herself to clean the hot water bath. But she hasn't done so quietly--oh no, she's made a point of saying how she's cleaned it...this time. She's also made another rather pointed statement about time: It's my last time to ever make a mistake like this again. Oh, she couched it in the sage words of a master passing on Zen to her pupil--"I want you to develop a critical eye"--but she's delivered it with an ultimatum: get it right, or you're gone. Yes, she said that this is my last time to ever risk contamination. When--I'm no fool, I know how research works, so this is a when not 'if' situation--I do inevitably have one dish with contaminant, is she going to overreact and see contamination as conspiracy on my part? Willful stupidity of this dumb American girl who put sera in dirty water again?

I can't read her sometimes. Mostly, it seems she's just pissed at the world and everyone. She is also paranoid as hell. She sees conspiracy everywhere, so it really shouldn't surprise me she sees me as being involved in one, too. Someone took our forceps, that was legit. But I'm not allowed to detach the timer from its velcro holster because someone has stolen her timer three times. Most of us lab folk will fess to copping others' timers, but the few, the proud, the psychotic know just how many times this has been done and do nothing about it. She's also convinced that someone stole some of our glassware (I am less convinced, and I was here during the alleged burglary), despite the fact she replaced it in a second by stealing it from the Christiano lab (where 'her' glassware had come from in the first place). I think 'irony' must not be in her Francais-Anglais Dictionnaire.

Anyway, I'm hurt that I'm being told I don't have a 'critical eye.' Every time I've confronted contamination with new protocols of my own to combat the chances of it happening again. I suggested that I re-autoclave the shelves from the incubator and that I leave the aliquot tubes under UV light an extra 15 minutes instead of just dividing up the serum. Sigh. I was angry and wounded when I started this, now I'm just dejected. Stupid uptight Frenchwoman.