Labmate from hell

Warning: Long, bitchy post ahead.


Those who are have been around me for the past few weeks or so would know that my biggest gripe and whine currently would be this labmate from hell - a middle-east guy who's doing PhD also under my supervisor. Now there's been a bunch of middle-eastern students in my uni, I think due to a special memorandum of cooperation or something. The main bone of contention is that they are doing post-grad studies without a degree in molecular biology (which is a wide aspect of biotechnology). So them being here, they haven't do labwork like we do before. They have zero knowledge on the theory and understanding of what we do. It's like asking a high-school kid to split atoms by pressing a sequence of buttons on a machine, without him knowing what's actually going on.

So then I have this labmate from hell - X. First off the bat, he doesn't know anything. Like how to use a micropipette which is used for transferring liquids in the range of 0.1-1000 microlitre (ul). Which would be tantamount to an IT consultant not knowing how use Windows.Or that he's confounded when a protocol for an experiment calls 0.75 ml of buffer (1ml = 1000 ul, you do the simple math) and he comes asking me whether we have a pipettes for that. When I point him to the appropriate one, he spend another good 5 minutes examining it and twirling the liquid volume setting and asking my other colleague for verification.


3 pipettes with different volume ranges



Using a pipette

So maybe he doesn't know all that as he's never used them before. But pardon me, isn't he supposed to be a PhD student? Well, Wikipedia is has become quite comprehensive and a quick reference point. Still struggling with measurements of ml and ul? Quite a few times actually, like when he's supposed to take 3.25 ml and he used the 100-1000ul pipette set to 325 ul. I keep asking reminding him again and again he needs to take 3.25 ml and he shows me the 325 ul on the pipette, "Yes, yes. 325". I swear I was about to explode, thankfully some divine force granted him enlightenment soon after.

X doesn't read manuals carefully and write down the steps in simplified flow-chart, so that the experiment can be done smoothly without errors. Which is like defusing a bomb while reading long winding lines of the manual. Or preparing certain things needed before starting (which I suppose, could *possibly* be known from reading the manual carefully and planning your work in a simple flow-chart). Kinda like how you usually take out the chicken half an hour before cooking and turning on the oil a few minutes earlier for it to heat.

There was this time he wanted to start work using a new reagent kit which we've never used before, and I told (again and again) him to read the manual carefully first. And he goes with his usual "Yes, yes".

I took a quick glance at the steps and asked him, "What about these temperatures for incubation? Have you turned on the machines yet?" (These machines also takes time to heat up/cool down to a specific temperature, which is why they need to be turned on earlier).

"I haven't used these machines before. Where are these machines? How do you use them?"

I went ##!!@@@$$ inside.

Then there are things in the lab which we all used in shared fashion. An analogy would be a kitchen with a few cooks - usually there'll be a big bottle of sauce, or even chopped garlic in a jar. Usually there's no written rule on who should refill the sauce bottle or chop garlic, people just understand and take turns doing it. Well, in my case X just used them but have never tried or asked to refill things he used. That nice big bottle of TAE buffer running low - never bothered to ask where it came from. Little plastic PCR and microcentrifuge tubes nicely sterilised and packed in bottles (with names of the people who packed them), he probably chalked it up to little lab-elves that come out at night.

And then there's also the pipette tips, which is used in conjunction with the micropippete to transfer liquids. Each time you do a transfer, you use one tip. Which is actually quite bad fro the environment cos it's plastic and you can use up to 5-6 tips to mix liquids to prepare for a single reaction in a tube. So anyway these tips are usually used up pretty quickly. We keep a large basket of these boxes of pipette tips which has been filled up and autoclaved (sterilised). And then a few boxes are placed on the workbench and whoever's doing work there will use them. Then the empty boxes are put aside and after it piles up, they'll be refilled, autoclaved and returned to the big basket.


A typical box of pipette tips

X knows about the big basket, he goes and dig up a new box when it runs out. And I've refilled the pipette tips in front of him at least 3 times (twice on purpose). Yet he has never deigned to refill those empty boxes. Sure he may not use as much as us, but who's keeping count? Couldn't he have done it, perhaps out of courtesy? Or goodwill since he does rely on me and my colleague a lot?

Like yesterday and today's incident. Now our lab is undergoing renovation, so we had to move to another lab and I just took a few boxes that we've been using, so they're about less than half of tips inside. Late in the evening I started to refill the some of the empty boxes (around 9 boxes). He was doing some work halfway when the tips ran out and he ask me whether he can use the ones I've refilled; I told him no, they haven't been autoclaved. So I asked him to borrow some tips from others as the big basket of tips is in our old lab and it's quite troublesome to take them. He proceeded to do just that and went home straight after that. Not even a simple, "Need some help filling up the tips?' Not to mention that I've actually finished my work for the day and had just refilled the tips to pass the time cos he wasn't finish and to leave him unattended in a lab is like letting Chucky run free in a nursery.

The next morning, I started to seal them and label the boxes for autoclaving. He came in and started to asked me all sorts of questions. I just told him to wait. I go about cleaning, labelling, and what-nots before settling down and guiding him from A-Z on what he needs to do that day - which in this case happens to bee a simple procedure which can only be done in the evening due to time factor etc. So he went back immediately. Then I noticed there were 2 more boxes of tips which only has a few left and so I took out the bag of tips to refill them later. But I got busy with my work and left them there, near his table. Later in the evening, he returned to do his work which requires quite a lot of tips. He noticed the box of pipettes (with the bag of tips just next to it) had only a few left, so he shoved it aside and take a new box (which I've taken from the big basket at our old lab earlier). Then he go about his work, finished, asked me a few questions on what to do tomorrow, spent about 10 minutes trying to understand what to do tomorrow, and then left. All the while with 2 nearly-empty box and a bag of pipette tips just next to him.

I dunno about you, but for me when you're starting out in a new workplace or office, you usually try to pick up what your colleagues are doing around the office. And you try to be more helpful with things to learn more and get into your colleagues' good books, especially since you'll be depending on them a lot initially. Like when we were undergrads doing our labwork for thesis, we helped filled out countless tips and helped around the lab cos, well we were very dependent on our seniors there. And when I started out last year, I did the same thing as the new guy, to learn more about the lab, and to foster goodwill with my new colleagues.

In my case, he depends on us 99.99% of the time. Not just how to do things, but what to do. "What do I do after this? What to do next?" The only time he ever asked about a buffer or kit is when he needs to use them and he ask whether they're already prepared (which mostly is) and they're found them.

Am I asking for much? Is he really that dumb that he's not aware of things like these? Do I need to tell him directly to his face in billboard-sized letters that he needs to move his ass around the lab too? Does he somehow assumes that it's my job to keep things on the ready in the lab since I'm just a research assistant and he's a *coughs* Phd. student? Which is utterly stupid, cos he know I'm also working on my own project and he also gets paid under a GRA scheme (graduate research assistant). More actually, since he technically has a Master's.

There are plenty more things about him that drives me up the wall, but to go over all of them would probably result in a book thicker than the Lord of the Rings trilogy.