Too Much Lab

Author | Nikhil V.

Editor  | Rex S.

As usual, I woke up an hour later than I had set my alarm for (I hit snooze roughly 4-5 times). Unfortunately, the first thing I see when I wake up is Hemmy eating a banana and playing a match of mid ladder (~6400 trophies; Daniel asked me to include that he has more trophies at ~6500). As I’m writing this, Gracy is asking me to include that she got a high score of 10 million in subway surfers, which took her roughly 75 minutes  (she has played for over 430 hrs…).

After taking a shower and missing breakfast, I meet Leon who asks me “why the **** is it so cold??” and was complaining about it being 50 degrees outside during the summer. (Skill issue; wear a jacket)

 

After a chilly walk to the Chemistry building, we <encountered a wild Brian> who decides that as we’re getting in the elevator that he would take the stairs instead. Unfortunately though, on his way up the stairs, he presses every button, stopping us at each floor before reaching our destination…..








Our first lab task for today is transferring our incubated bacterial samples to large 1 liter pools of growth medium (honestly, it feels like we did this yesterday instead of today, time is passing by so slowly here at SSP…).

 

After transferring our samples, we have to make some buffers for us to use later. While doing this, we discover that a bottle of growth media (from Kenny’s lab table) has been contaminated with external bacteria and has grown a cloudy culture (oops a bottle of growth media wasted I guess). As we’re preparing buffers, I can hear nearby SSPeople discussing how they’d like to “drink the growth media”, and how the bottle of contaminated media looks like kombucha (???).

At this point in this post, I’m obligated to note that it’s Jiya Patel’s (a student) birthday!!!

While mixing the buffer, I meet an SSPer in the other lab room (code name: green hair) who tells me about the various heinous crimes she’s committed throughout the day, including but not limited to cutting off Jeremy in the line to the weight balance.

 

Also apparently Jeremy growls (?????) Lauren and Daniel????

 

Daniel decides to take a nap and miss lunch after already missing breakfast (tbh kinda an unhealthy decision… :(( )

 

After leaving the lab upstairs, we went down to the lab in the basement, where we grew the larger cultures of bacteria. Dr. L was super nice and let us use the cargo elevator too, allowing all 18 of us to get down pretty quickly.   We wait in a nearby room for like ~4-5 hours, and my group decides to try and work on creating a homolog for our mystery gene X during this time. We’re pretty hungry and unproductive though, so we end up getting lunch down by Forest Hall first. 

 

After downing a water bottle of iced coffee, I’m ready to finish the model. We finish the model, and soon it’s time to go check on our bacteria. They’ve barely grown. 

 

We decide after this to go get Starbucks because it’s going to close soon, and we go to Starbucks and finish up our objective document. 

 

Every couple hours we end up going to the lab, and we go into the lab twice before the bacteria meet the required absorbance value. In between these lab sessions though, we get free time, and I end up taking a small nap and eating dinner between these lab sessions as well.

 

I’m finally back at the dorm, and I’m finally allowed to sleep…

There was too much lab.