For want of a nail

Ours is a relatively new lab. Which means it's constantly in the process of being set up. And that means there's new equipment/chemicals/supplies coming in nearly everyday. Right now, my workbench is filled with boxes of pipettes that need to be moved to the store room. And honestly, it isn't comfortable typing with a laptop on your lap. Which kinda defeats the purpose of a laptop, but anyway.

Part of the problem with supplies coming in is that more often than not, somebody messes up somewhere. In the last three months we got reagents we didn't need, equipment we couldn't use and, of course, cells that kept dying on us :) More often than not, it's like that nursery rhyme:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of the shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of the horse, the rider was lost;
For want of the rider, the battle was lost;
For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost;
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail

Case in point, the big-ass centrifuge we had sitting idle for two months in our lab. We couldn't use it because it didn't have the right kind of holders for the tubes we were using. It was pretty frustrating to see that big hunk of metal just sitting there, taking up space.

But that's nothing compared to the trouble we've had getting laminar flow hoods for our cell culturing work. A laminar flow hood is a metal bench which is enclosed from three sides has a door on the fourth and a blower on top. The blower blows finely filtered air through the enclosed space, to prevent contamination by organisms floating in the air. We use two different kinds of hoods for our work. A simpler, more robust kind for working on bacteria (because bacteria are robust), and a more sterile, more expensive kind for animal cell cultures. And right now, we need four of the bacterial ones and two of the animal cell ones. Here's what's happened so far:

Initially, we'd ordered one of the animal cell ones from a local manufacturer. It arrived on time, and did everything we wanted it to do. It wasn't great, but it did the job. We then placed orders for two animal cell ones with an MNC and four bacterial ones with an Indian manufacturer.

The Indian hoods showed up first. And it was pretty messed up. The blower was at the bottom, although the vent was on top, There were holes on the metal workbench, which meant that if we worked with liquid media and if any happened to spill over, it could pour right into the blower mechanism. Plus, the door in front didn't close the way it was supposed to. There was no way we could use these, so we sent them away, and ordered new hoods from another manufacturer.

Next came the MNC hoods, all the way from the U.S. of A. Messed up even more, if anything. It had an annoying alarm that went off if the door was even a millimetre off the "correct" open position. It had no electric sockets (we use mechanical pipettes that need electricity) And even though it was of a different design, the door didn't close properly! Plus, only one showed up. The other hood is still missing.

And today, the hoods we ordered to replace the first bunch of bacterial hoods showed up. Weirdly, these have holes on the back wall, which means your workbench won't be sterile when the blower is off (in case you want to leave your media inside the hood overnight to set, for instance) But the worst part is that they didn't come with legs! That means the workbench is just 6 inches off the ground. Maybe they expect us to work sitting cross-legged on the floor...

And yet, in spite of all this we still manage to get work done. When somebody tells you that life in science isn't easy, believe them!