The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."Dick the Butcher", Henry VI Pt 2, Act iv scene ii
Never one to mince his words, the Bard of Stratford obviously never had to deal with administrators, specifically administrators responsible for Occupational Health and Safety.
As I type, the Cage is gripped in a frenzy of OHS paperwork. Apparently there is to be an audit next week, and as there have been so many serious incidents in biological labs all over the world (um, not) we each have to generate and maintain a folder that contains vast acreage of processed rainforest, to comply with OHS regulations. Note that this does not make us actually any safer (because, frankly, concern for one's own skin is a pretty good incentive to not killing oneself at work); the entire exercise is to keep the lawyers happy.
The University has a policy of "eliminating conditions and incidents that could result in personal injury or ill health", which, as far as any of my fellow rats can work out, consists in actively preventing us doing any research.
Consider: The amount of paperwork to be analysed, filled in, printed off and filed is going to knock the lab for six for two working days at least. Then each time we do an experiment we're supposed to go to our personal folder and check that we're complying with whatever, further reducing the time available to do anything. But this, cunning as it is, is not nearly enough.
Each potentially hazardous chemical needs to have a corresponding Materials Safety Data Sheet in your personal folder. And the recommended site for downloading these MSDSs is broken:
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Which means. . . because I can't download (and print) the MSDS, I'm not supposed to do the experiment. But I want to do the experiment (you know, I don't do this job for the money, I thought that should be obvious by now), so I'm forced to spend more time looking for the MSDSs on the individual suppliers' websites instead. Cunning.
But wait, there's more.
I've been reading the Cage's OHS website, — which you might think had actually been approved by someone who knows what it is we do — and, dumbly following instructions to the letter, we're supposed to mark each 'reaction' with a 'ChemAlert' label. Which means that for a standard tube containing one chemical, and the smallest available label, we get something that looks like this:
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Now, imagine two, or three, potentially hazardous chemicals in there. It would be impossible to work with. Devilishly cunning, and further proof that the lawyers and administrators who dream up these schemes (a) have no idea about what we actually do and (b) don't care; because their purpose is not to save lives but to prevent the University getting sued.
What they fail to realize is that no amount of paperwork is going to make the lab safer, and is in fact counter-productive because people get so pissed off about the whole deal they treat the entire OHS section as a complete joke. Which might very well lead directly to personal injury or ill health (I watched this happen in Cambridge. It was not pretty then, and it is not pretty now).
Sod it all. I'm going to set up a PCR without having printed off a risk assessment, and bugger the lawyers.
Comments
That's craziness. I've never been anywhere where Safety made us (1) collect MSDSs, (2) label individual reactions. My experience has actually been that -- much as we complain about Safety people -- they've actually been pretty helpful, understanding, and cooperative. Have you checked with one of them to see if they actually require these things, or if it's a game of "Telephone" where the real requirements have blurred as they got passed along?
If they are real requirements, then you have my sympathy.
(Now the comment submission is rejecting my comment because of the "feature that requires a weblog commenter to wait a short amount of time before being able to post again", even though this time I carefully didn't preview, apparently because I posted here a couple weeks ago.)
Posted by: Ian | October 17, 2007 09:22 PM
Sorry about the comment craziness. It got through, though. I'll try to tweak the score card.
No, I haven't checked whether they 'really' want that; I was too pissed off to do anything other than my PCR this afternoon!
Posted by: BK | October 17, 2007 10:23 PM
I'm wondering if the comment problem may be a Safari thing. It failed twice with Safari but went through with Firefox, and Safari (I'm using a 3.0beta) does have some issues with forms at times. If this goes through (on Safari) that's not likely to be the problem, though.
Posted by: Ian | October 17, 2007 10:59 PM
Not a Safari thing - I tried posting earlier and got the same message.
I was just going to say that we have no lawyers defending our administration - there is just spontaneous generation of this sort of inanity in every large organization. Sorry.
Did you see Ian McKellan's version of Dick? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114279/
Still gives me chills. The movie was a wee bit uneven but god, McKellan was beyond fabulous.
Posted by: Alethea | October 18, 2007 07:35 AM
Mm, I don't seem to be having that trouble.
Anyway, I don't think it's spontaneous. I think there's definitely some sort of driving mentality.
I saw McKellan's RIII a few years ago; fantastic stuff.
Posted by: BK | October 18, 2007 07:43 AM
I distinctly recall having to put a WHMIS (=Workplace Hazardous Materials Information System) sticker on a box.of.instant.milk.powder once. Because it was in the lab.
Of course, I checked off ALL the boxes: lab coat required, check. Wear gloves, check. Goggles, check. Use in fume hood? Check.
Someone in a nearby lab re-labelled his giant carboy of 70% ethanol as "70% DNA Precipitation Buffer", since as it is flammable it was supposed to be in a metal can in a flammables cabinet.
Sigh.
Don't even get me started on *radiation* safety...
Posted by: Whiffling dangerously | October 18, 2007 10:40 AM
Back in the day in the UK (not sure what the sketch is now), we had COSHH. EVERYTHING used in the lab needed a COSHH form. Including water. Now this scheme was not too bad as all you needed to do was make sure that each raw ingredient in an experiment had a COSHH form on file. Never read them though. Not ever. Not even for 5-mercaptoethanol, which apparently could conjugate your DNA to that of a passing fly and turn you into a Hollywood B-movie.
The regs that pissed me of the most were the Home Office animal regs. In what sort of regulatory environment does a scientist have to put a rat to sleep with a complicated cocktail of paediatric medicines while reading the Wind in The Willows to it in a soft voice, and the farmer running the barns at the end of the driveway, and employed by the same Government organisation, can hit one over the head with a shovel? And octopii. Exactly who decided that an octopus is more intelligent than a fish and consequently needs to be read the same novel of riverbank adventures, while a salmon twice its size is introduced to 'The Priest'?
Posted by: Nige | October 18, 2007 11:20 PM
Well, um, if you look at their brains octopi almost certainly *are* more intelligent than fish.
... but no, what really gets me is the auditors at the financial firm where we work. They're insisting that *we* fill out materials safety data sheets! Let's see, what materials do we work with? Paper and computers. Oh, and toner, dangerous stuff, that, if we were to eat huge quantities of it instead of putting it in laser printers.
(Meanwhile, I have ranted to the Black Knight before about their (lack of) response to things like galloping RSI, which actually *can*, you know, permanently cripple you.)
I must say that even that isn't as ludicrous as the situation you've got going. Can't you invite some of the responsible administrators down to look at the results? I mean that test tube is so *obviously* ridiculous even to the totally untutored that surely they'd do something. (Hopefully not something too destructive...)
Posted by: Nix | October 19, 2007 09:13 AM