Don't Burn Down the Lab

And now for a much lighter post.......

Two things you need to know about my boss:

a) He's very particular about where things are in lab, knowing exactly how many or how much of something is in the lab, what gets turned off/stays on at the end of the day etc. (We actually have a theory that when he comes in each morning, he does a tour of the lab to check everything out).

b) He's prone to reacting first, thinking and noticing (sometimes) later.

For example, one morning the three of us were greeted with "We have 8 ice buckets and I only counted 7. Where is that other ice bucket? If one of you left it somewhere you'd better get it back. We need all of our ice buckets." and on and on and on. In fact, the ice bucket was in the hood in our lab, where I had left it overnight while the dry ice/ethanol bath evaporated. If he'd been even the slightest bit observant he would have seen it (kind of one of those if it had been a bear moments........) and could have saved us all this rant. Incidents like this happen at least once a week and we're to the point now where we just sigh, point to where the 8th ice bucket (or whatever he happens to think we've lost that day) is and then roll our eyes at each other when he leaves.

With that in mind.........

Incident 1) One morning about 2 weeks ago he came in and was all in a snit because one of our heat blocks had been left on at 95 degrees* overnight and he was raving about how we almost burned the lab down. We do try to turn them off each night, but every so often we forget. Of course it's not great to leave these things on unattended, but for this heat block to cause the fire that would destroy the lab is a significant leap.

Incident 2) We have a water bath that is normally at 42 degrees, but is often used to incubate a particular solution for a particular experiment that both the boss and the grad student have been doing lately. They turn it up to 68 degrees when needed and then back to 42 degrees when they're done. No big deal. The other day, the grad student got a huge lecture from the boss about making sure that the water level in the bath is kept high when she's using it at 68 degrees since it evaporates quickly at that temperature and we don't want to burn the lab down (either he has an irrational fear of the lab burning down or he secretly wishes that's what would happen).

This morning our lab was filled with the smell of melted plastic because our boss cranked the water bath up to 68 degrees last night and didn't check the water level. This morning when he got here the water bath was completely dry and sizzling and the plastic rack that he'd left in there had completely melted and was burning. Imagine the delight of our technician this morning when she was greeted by the boss telling her that he nearly burned the lab down. Ironic, no?

*All temperatures are centigrade