Dear All,

Please could you spare me some (secondary) Mouse or Goat
Anti-Rabbit-HRP.

Thanks for your help

I’m not even entirely sure what the hell that is.

Hi all,

Tomorrow is the annually scheduled calibration day for Geiger meters. According to the state regulations, the meter you use must be calibrated at least once a year. If you use Geiger meters, please drop them off to my office TODAY, with your lab name clearly labelled on each meter, and I will have them returned by the end of tomorrow.

I love that I work in a place that has enough Geiger meters to warrent an all hands email.

My boss (and, I think based on a few things he said, his wife too) is a total geek. He plays MMORPGs or at least has dabbled in them enough to get the humor about them. He goes to LAN parties. He thinks blowing shit up sounds like a really good time. He has a collection of Star Wars figures on his desk, including an original, well used and obviously loved Chewbacca figure.

I think I adore this man.

It’s almost a shame he’s my boss because I’d totally like to go out for a beer with the guy sometime, or invite him to a LAN party, or to D&D, or maybe eventually a mac bash. He’s just fun to be around.

So far though, I’ve contented myself with introducing him to any humor I mention that he doesn’t know. It’s a five year project. I’ve got plenty of time.

Today I introduced my boss to Something Awful. He’d seen it before, but hadn’t spent a lot of time there. So I pointed him here and here. (The first one: Diary of A droid repair technician. The second one: scamming idiots for money by whoring yourself in World of Warcraft.)

He was laughing so hard he was actually crying and gasping for breath.

I got him to do it again after lunch by introducing him to The Gallery of Regrettable Food.

I like my boss. He’s a fun toy!

My boss finally got me on the Shortie Research Institute email system, which generates a lot of junk email, but occasionally pops up with the most amazingly Star Trek sounding requests. Pure research is definitely for me. These are so surreal.

———–
Subject: Gamma or x-ray source

Hello All,

I was wondering if anyone knows if we have access to an gamma irradiator or an x-ray machine that can be used to irradiate mouse fibroblasts cells?

Regards,
———–
Dear All

Does anyone have any transfectable human cell line? If
so, could you make me so lucky by giving me a vial of
frozen cells?

Thanks,
————
Subject: Did you lose your brain?

I found a brain sample in the dry ice container downstairs. It’s labeled “Brain 4″. If it’s yours, I have it safely stored in dry ice, away from light in room 2712.

Mindfully,
————

This last one is definitely my favorite.

Of course, the Lil Swiss Biotech also fields the occasional amusing email, mostly because of their absolute terror of animal rights activists. (Apparently some animal rights activist group once mistakenly targeted the office I work in as a bastion of animal based research. Now I don’t doubt that there is a branch of the Lil Swiss Biotech that uses lab animals. But we are not it. I’m not positive, but I don’t think we even have E. coli here. We have human blood and dna samples, and some tubes of HPV (Human Papilloma Virus). So when the animal rights activists stormed through the front doors and went running through the building looking for animals to liberate, well… I don’t think the tank of pet goldfish was quite what they were looking for. Anyway, that was before my time. No one else here seems to find the whole scenario nearly as amusing as I do.)
————
Subject: World Animal Week

Dear LSB Employees and Associates,

Animal rights groups are calling for “World Week for Animals in Laboratories”, from April 23 – 30. In the past, animal rights groups have organized events, including protests, vigils, news conferences, and leafleting. To date, actions by this group have been peaceful. We have no indication that Lil Swiss is a target, however, we are alerting everyone to pay close attention to the entrances and exits into the various buildings. Please do not let anyone in the building if they are not wearing a Lil Swiss ID badge.

We have notified local law enforcement agencies. As always, if you see any suspicious activity, please contact security at the numbers listed below.

Thank you for your cooperation.
————

Have I mentioned that Biotech amuses me?

It occurs to me that I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t posted a damn thing about the new job.

Once again this is another one of those weird contractor things, except this time I get benefits, which fucking rules.

Technically speaking, I work for the Shortie Research Institute, part of the Shortie Hospital Network. The Shortie Research Institute (or SRI for short… heh, get it, short? Er… Anyway…) has it’s own building that is very nice, and really pretty, with a great library, and lots of little labs. And all they do is research. Pure research. Much of it on Shorties since that’s the population the hospital serves. So SRI is my employer, and my benefits and paycheck come from them.

I don’t work in the SRI building. I work at the Lil Swiss Biotech’s local research lab. And I’d explain that, but I’m not sure I fully understand how everything I’ve been told pieces together. Oh, and to top it off, my salary comes from a NIH grant. So I’m a government funded employee at a not-for-profit hospital, working in the labs of a for-profit international biotech company.

And I thought my designation at the DNA Rendering Plant was long and cumbersome to explain.

The linchpin to this weird business relationship is my boss’ boss who is both the Vice President of research at the Lil Swiss Biotech, and the head of the Genetics research department at the Shortie Research Institute. He’s also the person who emailed me to let me know they were hiring and did I want to interview for a job I hadn’t applied for?

Important note: if anyone ever asks you if you want to interview for a position you didn’t apply for, the answer is always, “yes.”

Anyway, the job itself involves typing DNA samples from people with auto-immune diseases. There are many diseases being looked at, but my group (that would be my boss and me, and since my boss hired me to process the samples, that would be me…) only looks at two diseases and a control population. There is another group at the SRI that are looking at the same samples, but they’re looking at a different gene than we are. And someday, when I feel like I’ve got about 14 extra hours to try and explain it intelligently, I’ll tell you what genes we’re looking at, and why. The short version is that we’re looking at one of the genes in the immune system. And in case you’ve never taken immunology (I haven’t, I’ve learned on the job), I’ll try to explain what makes the immune system so damn hard to explain.

The immune system is the best arguement for evolution I have ever seen. It’s riddled with repetitions and dual coverage stemming from two totally different cell lines. Imagine that you took a coding team of about 200 people, about 1/2 of which were familiar with how the hardware of a Mac worked. Imagine that the other half knew how the hardware of a PC worked.

Now imagine that you got them all really drunk, and then chained them to their computers with nothing but a pot of coffee and a bottle of tequila (each) and left them there for 48 hours to build an operating system. At the end, you took what they’d coded, slapped it all together in one huge file and compiled it. No editing. No commentary. And say by some miracle, the program actually sort of worked. You now have a basic idea of where our immune systems come from. I suspect this is also true for Windows 98.

And now you know why I will never be an immunologist.

Okay, my pug has come to collect me, it must be time for bed. More later.

For those of you without a blogger account, I apologize for the extra step, but I just got my first comment spam.

It irritated me.

So now I turned on the word verification feature. You have to enter the word you see in the box to post here. Sorry about the extra step, but it’s not exactly a raging bastion of posting anyway these days, and spam really annoys me. It’s better if it goes away.

And yes. I’m still here. One of these days I’ll post again… hell, maybe even tonight.