Day from Hell
Aug. 3rd, 2004 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trinityvixenIf I didn't wait until today to post about yesterday's disasters, I would have gotten a full rant out and then had a critical error that lost the whole thing. It was that kind of a mother-fucking day. I'm with Garfield. I hate Mondays.
The day started out innocently enough. I wasn't tired, for one, which is always nice. I talked to Vanessa about getting money but no stub, and she confirmed that, as I'd been paid as a casual employee until my paperwork went through, I was in fact paid. Finally. After a month and a half, a check. Not much of one, and it better NOT have been for the entire time (because those are some serious taxes if I've only earned that much in 6 weeks), and there is more sorting out to be done, but at least I have started to accrue instead of just expending money.
All downhill from there. I lost the battle with contamination of my patient cell line. This line had had a contaminant in one set of dishes, so I'd thrown them then tried to grow more from the older stock. By the end of Friday last week, I had one dish that wasn't contaminated. Monday, it sure was, and that was the end of that line. Talking with my boss on the phone, she said not to thaw the reserve cells (I haven't learned how at any rate) because it would be easier for me to get the hang of cell culture work with fewer plates. That really hurt. I've been working up until this one extraordinary round of losses with only ONE contaminated dish to my name. One. And then I lost this cell line, and suddenly none of my previous work matters, and, in a sentence, I learn how little my boss thinks of what I've learned to do. Never mind that I've carried on well in her absence and sorted out most of my problems with this damn position on my own. What a downer.
But it was about to get worse. My gel finally didn't leak, but as punishment it didn't run very well either. The machine generating the current actually switched off four or five times before I gave up the ghost of trying to get it to run, all due to a 'rapid change in resistance,' which means absolutely nothing to me. I'd never encountered anything like it before. The gel was worthless for transferring--the marker protein ladder was a mess and that was enough to convince me to toss it (if you can't measure the protein size, it doesn't help to see that anti-body bound on a Western blot because you have no real proof it bound to what you say it did). All that effort, gone. To add insult to injury, and hell, to add another fucking injury, I split open my thumb at the top near the nail (one of the most highly inconvenient places to have a cut) trying to pry apart the glass plates from the setup. So, basically, I was gonna get whatever I worked on in that cut (luckily, I only tried the clean up at the end of the day, so it was just anti-bacterial soap, for the most part). Stupid glass.
Then came the transfection splitting. My boss said to do over the control and other patient line (yes, I can keep some non-hardy cells alive) at the same time, so it meant twice as much work. And, in turn, the 'twice' became three- or four-times as much. My boss decided I wasn't counting cells properly (I have no idea where this came from as my counts were pretty good in my lab notebook to date, and I have used a hemocytometer--cell counter--before in Silver lab). So, instead of letting me count the cells in the crosshairs of the hemocytometer, she insisted I count all the cells in the total of nine squares on the grid. That's nine times the work already, eighteen overall when you take into account the fact that there are two slots on the counter and both have the nine-square grid to count. It was not helped by poor resuspension on the patient line, which I ultimately, after counting nine squares on one side and enough of the other to see that they were very different from each other, had to redo.
But, the control, which I managed to count and be done with, well, that should have been no problem at all. Except that I got an attack of the clumsies and spilled some of it, and, after sitting waiting for me to figure out that the patient line needed reworking, it was not homogenous. I had to resuspend and count that one again. The patient required yet another restart, bringing the total attempts to count to three for that, two for the control. At that point, I swear I started to see little black things moving around in the control, but it may have been eyestrain (I panicked about it anyway because I couldn't recall seeing them in the patient line--more contamination? holy god, I hope not).
The work day from hell, coupled with being made to feel like a neophyte over the phone by my boss, dragged me down. I got home and must have looked like Lurch to Ping and Carrie--I was sullen, didn't say much, and just was there while other people were happy. I couldn't even make the effort to be happy, something would go wrong.
Something, of course, did go wrong. I tried to make dinner and broke an egg because it was too close to the edge of the counter and fell to the floor. I managed to get through my cooking without burning myself (that was a close shave), and then went to talk to Liz about her new apartment. For the first time in the whole day, I managed to be genuinely happy (maybe it was because someone else was celebrating something exciting that did it). I even kept my plate from falling off my desk when it threatened to. Finally, finally, a reversal in fortunes. I kid you not, I actually smiled and thought, in these exact words, "I can't believe that didn't tumble to the floor, given the day I've had."
::groans::
My dinner promptly tipped and fell over, and this time I couldn't catch it. That did it. I had made eggs with cheese, not exactly a 'brush it off and it will be fine 'cause, you know, five-seconds rule' type of meal. I completely broke down into uncontrollable sobs as I cleaned it up. I was so angry and frustrated that for a while, I left the plate alone and seriously contemplated eating the eggs anyway. I held the plate up to my face to see if the damage was that bad: a few hairs, some tufts of fluff (it had miraculously none of the carpet on it, though I suspect it actually did and the unfortunate coloring of the carpet was lost on the white-ish yellow background of my food). Instead, still crying and sputtering a few curses, I made dinner a second time and ate it from a plate that I kept in my lap (the whole desk is cursed, mark me) the whole time.
Crying is incredibly cathartic. It really just took all the fight and frustration of the day out of me. Carrie and Ping were gone to eat dinner out, so there was no one to comfort me, and you know what? That really helped, in a way. There was nothing to smoothe over the rage and despair and unfairness that boiled over into tears, and that was a good thing. It got it out out out. I'm not an emotionally weepy person usually, and I think that getting it out this time helped drain some of my other frustrations as well, such as with the job's utter lack of help seeing that I'm treated like any other employee.
Thanks be to God, that day is over. I couldn't stomach another one like that for a long, long time. Today is already infinitely better for not being yesterday. Even if everything went wrong again (which it can't because too much has gone perfectly right), it wouldn't be Monday, and that's a blessing and a mercy.
The day started out innocently enough. I wasn't tired, for one, which is always nice. I talked to Vanessa about getting money but no stub, and she confirmed that, as I'd been paid as a casual employee until my paperwork went through, I was in fact paid. Finally. After a month and a half, a check. Not much of one, and it better NOT have been for the entire time (because those are some serious taxes if I've only earned that much in 6 weeks), and there is more sorting out to be done, but at least I have started to accrue instead of just expending money.
All downhill from there. I lost the battle with contamination of my patient cell line. This line had had a contaminant in one set of dishes, so I'd thrown them then tried to grow more from the older stock. By the end of Friday last week, I had one dish that wasn't contaminated. Monday, it sure was, and that was the end of that line. Talking with my boss on the phone, she said not to thaw the reserve cells (I haven't learned how at any rate) because it would be easier for me to get the hang of cell culture work with fewer plates. That really hurt. I've been working up until this one extraordinary round of losses with only ONE contaminated dish to my name. One. And then I lost this cell line, and suddenly none of my previous work matters, and, in a sentence, I learn how little my boss thinks of what I've learned to do. Never mind that I've carried on well in her absence and sorted out most of my problems with this damn position on my own. What a downer.
But it was about to get worse. My gel finally didn't leak, but as punishment it didn't run very well either. The machine generating the current actually switched off four or five times before I gave up the ghost of trying to get it to run, all due to a 'rapid change in resistance,' which means absolutely nothing to me. I'd never encountered anything like it before. The gel was worthless for transferring--the marker protein ladder was a mess and that was enough to convince me to toss it (if you can't measure the protein size, it doesn't help to see that anti-body bound on a Western blot because you have no real proof it bound to what you say it did). All that effort, gone. To add insult to injury, and hell, to add another fucking injury, I split open my thumb at the top near the nail (one of the most highly inconvenient places to have a cut) trying to pry apart the glass plates from the setup. So, basically, I was gonna get whatever I worked on in that cut (luckily, I only tried the clean up at the end of the day, so it was just anti-bacterial soap, for the most part). Stupid glass.
Then came the transfection splitting. My boss said to do over the control and other patient line (yes, I can keep some non-hardy cells alive) at the same time, so it meant twice as much work. And, in turn, the 'twice' became three- or four-times as much. My boss decided I wasn't counting cells properly (I have no idea where this came from as my counts were pretty good in my lab notebook to date, and I have used a hemocytometer--cell counter--before in Silver lab). So, instead of letting me count the cells in the crosshairs of the hemocytometer, she insisted I count all the cells in the total of nine squares on the grid. That's nine times the work already, eighteen overall when you take into account the fact that there are two slots on the counter and both have the nine-square grid to count. It was not helped by poor resuspension on the patient line, which I ultimately, after counting nine squares on one side and enough of the other to see that they were very different from each other, had to redo.
But, the control, which I managed to count and be done with, well, that should have been no problem at all. Except that I got an attack of the clumsies and spilled some of it, and, after sitting waiting for me to figure out that the patient line needed reworking, it was not homogenous. I had to resuspend and count that one again. The patient required yet another restart, bringing the total attempts to count to three for that, two for the control. At that point, I swear I started to see little black things moving around in the control, but it may have been eyestrain (I panicked about it anyway because I couldn't recall seeing them in the patient line--more contamination? holy god, I hope not).
The work day from hell, coupled with being made to feel like a neophyte over the phone by my boss, dragged me down. I got home and must have looked like Lurch to Ping and Carrie--I was sullen, didn't say much, and just was there while other people were happy. I couldn't even make the effort to be happy, something would go wrong.
Something, of course, did go wrong. I tried to make dinner and broke an egg because it was too close to the edge of the counter and fell to the floor. I managed to get through my cooking without burning myself (that was a close shave), and then went to talk to Liz about her new apartment. For the first time in the whole day, I managed to be genuinely happy (maybe it was because someone else was celebrating something exciting that did it). I even kept my plate from falling off my desk when it threatened to. Finally, finally, a reversal in fortunes. I kid you not, I actually smiled and thought, in these exact words, "I can't believe that didn't tumble to the floor, given the day I've had."
::groans::
My dinner promptly tipped and fell over, and this time I couldn't catch it. That did it. I had made eggs with cheese, not exactly a 'brush it off and it will be fine 'cause, you know, five-seconds rule' type of meal. I completely broke down into uncontrollable sobs as I cleaned it up. I was so angry and frustrated that for a while, I left the plate alone and seriously contemplated eating the eggs anyway. I held the plate up to my face to see if the damage was that bad: a few hairs, some tufts of fluff (it had miraculously none of the carpet on it, though I suspect it actually did and the unfortunate coloring of the carpet was lost on the white-ish yellow background of my food). Instead, still crying and sputtering a few curses, I made dinner a second time and ate it from a plate that I kept in my lap (the whole desk is cursed, mark me) the whole time.
Crying is incredibly cathartic. It really just took all the fight and frustration of the day out of me. Carrie and Ping were gone to eat dinner out, so there was no one to comfort me, and you know what? That really helped, in a way. There was nothing to smoothe over the rage and despair and unfairness that boiled over into tears, and that was a good thing. It got it out out out. I'm not an emotionally weepy person usually, and I think that getting it out this time helped drain some of my other frustrations as well, such as with the job's utter lack of help seeing that I'm treated like any other employee.
Thanks be to God, that day is over. I couldn't stomach another one like that for a long, long time. Today is already infinitely better for not being yesterday. Even if everything went wrong again (which it can't because too much has gone perfectly right), it wouldn't be Monday, and that's a blessing and a mercy.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
owch
Date: 2004-08-03 12:22 pm (UTC)