Life of a Lab Rat

Now that three noticeboard have been installed near the lifts on every floor in our building, we will be populating them soon with informative materials.

Such as, presumably, Don't use the lifts unless you're happy to be stuck in them for a while.

Anyway,

1. The notice board with perspex cover on the right will have OH&S info together with Emergency procedures and contacts

2. The notice board in the middle with perspex cover will have a floor plan
with room numbers and a directory of those whi occupy these rooms

3. The notice board on the left without the perspex cover will carry
temporary notices for general use that will be removed on a regular basis.

These will be the perspex covers of which two (at least) were screwed on so tight that this morning, before any notices went in them, they were already broken.

I like the implication that the notices that are actually useful or interesting will be removed on a regular basis, and are not protected by (broken) perspex. Given the state of our lifts and air-conditioning, we're not really surprised.

Some people just don't get it.

A reader wrote to me, on the horrors of MSDS and risk assessments etc., and suggested I look at something called 'Chemwatch'.

So I looked at the website, and BANG! Browser window resize! Choice of flash or non-flash! Eye-hurting design!

Wake up guys. That stuff is sooo last millennium. And because of it, I really can't be arsed.

Adapted from an email I've just sent to the Head:

This is beyond ludicrous. If we are each to have a copy of the OHS paperwork, the maths looks like this:

Say 6 risk assessments, 6 SOPs. 20 MSDS sheets, at an average of 5 pages each. Four pages of policy document. Call it 115 pieces of paper. Thirty people in our group. That's three and a half thousand pieces of paper - best part of 7 reams. That's nearly half a tree, plus the toner used.

And that's just one quarter? one third if we're generous of Level N. I really, really think that this needs a rethink.

The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

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:

.

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:

.

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.

I know we've got some hot scientists in this place but one of them ('V') actually caught fire this afternoon.

She lit a match, after noting the head was 'spiky', and some of the sulphur somehow flew backwards and next thing she knew her jumper was burning. V patted it out herself and is unharmed, if a little shaken. There's a burn mark on her clothing, which will be an interesting souvenir from her honours project.

We had a fire alarm earlier in the week (a case of 'provocative maintenance'; we had 'them' in to do some work on the fire alarm system and naturally, it went off) and we all looked at the ceilings, muttered under our collective breath, and prepared to evacuate.

As a good citizen I did a recce of our labs to make sure everyone was out and to close the doors. I came across two honours students in two different rooms.

"It's a fire alarm, out you go," I said.

"But my PCR!" said Student #1, pointing forlornly at his icebucket.

"Leave it. Out now!"

Second lab;

"Fire alarm! Outside!"

"But —" began Student #2, pointing forlornly at the centrifuge.

You get the picture.

When it's a management failure.

They've spent the last two weeks replacing the doors to our refurbished offices. I must admit that they look like any other doors to me, and the new one nearest my desk creaks as much as the old one. But it still opens and closes, like doors are supposed to. Apparently the original new doors were too light, or too small, or the wrong kind of wood, or something. So we have improved new doors, which I guess is a good thing.

It turns out that the project was were badly managed and the firm responsible 'lacked local knowledge' (I don't know, I just eavesdrop in corridors) which is why we ended up with sub-standard doors — not that those of us who use them on a daily basis had actually noticed. Ultimately someone has had to pay for the reworking of the doors, whether it's the department (I sincerely hope not) or the firm that was so poorly managed in the first place.