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trinityvixenSo, 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.
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.
