Waiting for grad school decisions.
Microsoft Word does not recognize the words “benthological” or “mesocosms”.
Use calibration curve to calculate the concentration of your samples…
1 ppm stock standard solution comes out to 28 ppm.
Run six standards to calibrate piece of equipment. Find out that lab partner took the samples out too soon and you have no results.
Re-run six standards to calibrate. Machine starts leaking hazardous waste and must take apart the machine to fix it.
Re-run standards again. Flame goes out. Get fractured results.
Wearing gloves while working with a dyed mounting medium: spill nothing.
Take off gloves: inexplicably get medium all over your hands and end up with random splotches of color.
You realize that you’re a nerd when you have serious conversations about your favorite type of mounting medium. Long live ProLong Gold! Vectashield must go!
You are conducting an experiment in a 96-well plate… using all of the wells. You’re part way through adding reagents to the wells when your boss stops by your lab bench. You stop what you’re doing to give him your full attention. He walks away. Oh, crap!!! You can’t remember what well you left off on. Fail.
When preparing sample loading buffer, you knock over your bottle of beta-mercaptoethanol. You yourself, your lab space, and the whole hallway now smell like natural gas, which is a gut-wrenching smell. Your entire wing has to evacuate. Everyone around hates you for a week.
You pick up your magnetic stir bar remover (long stick with a magnet at the end) to get the stir bar out of your solution, but all the paper clips on your lab bench come with it.
This may not count as a science major problem, but it’s at least a symptom of nerd-ity. After flash freezing cells in liquid nitrogen, you repeatedly freeze and thaw a vial of water just to see the LN2 boil. And, since that wasn’t enough, you gleefully splash the LN2 on the lab floor to watch it evaporate— and pretend like you’re walking on a cloud.
