Lots of pictures this month, but of only a few incidents, so this one's likely to be a photo gallery. Hah, I said that before, and it ended up being the wordiest one yet...

The trolley! The one I use for wheeling out biohazard waste, where we're supposed to treat everything even the outside of the bag touches as contaminated... and also for plain, recyclable cardboard. While it's unlikely plain steel is going to be actually contaminated by biohazards, so I wasn't bothered about the cardboard being contaminated as long as it didn't directly touch biohazard bags, I still cleaned it up with diluted Trigene sometimes.

While it's just thick, steel wire, I still left it outside to dry after cleaning it, as drips kept falling off for quite a while. Nobody, of course, was pigshit-thick enough to see a dripping wet trolley outside the door...

...and go "Whuh-whuh-whuhssis tuhrolley aduh-aduh-aduh-adoin' outside" and wheel it inside, leaving a wet trail, now are they?

Nobody except fucking Stammer, of course.

Fuck you, Stammer.

Apparently an empty trolley being just outside the door, clearly visible through the floor-to-ceiling glass, is still "wrong" and needs to be "fixed". I suppose he assumed if people didn't find the trolley in EXACTLY the usual place, they'd be unable to perceive it at all and go whinging it was "lost..."

Then again, this was the lab where the bloke who CAN"T EVEN SPELL HIS OWN FUCKING NAME, who started an autoclave with the door open, who ducked under a small rectangle of tape rather than just going around it, worked. So yeah, I can see that, actually.

Somebody's put some autoclaved pipette tips in the drying cabinet to dry. I wonder if, when they opened it, they noticed anything, I dunno, "off" about it...

"Off" like, y'know, it's fucking OFF. Nah mate, nah, it's usually the same temperature as the rest of the room. It makes things dry by magic!

Deteriorated, leaked old batteries just left laying around.

In most of the other labs, old bacterial growth trays, plastic pipette tips, plastic spreaders etc were all thrown in metal bins called Dixies. These got autoclaved at a high temperature, resulting in a big melted plastic "brick" of rubbish to be thrown out. Somebody's decided to "help" me by bagging up several of these bricks, each in it's own individual black plastic bag (there's that envrionmental policy again). They've then proceeded to just toss them in "vaguely the direction" of the trolley. They could not, of course, all be put in ONE black bin bag, and this put ON the trolley, could they?

Nah, that isn't possible.

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What do they do if a dixie is filled? Fold the bag over, bring it to the autoclave room, and put a lid on it? Nah, just fetch another and leave the full one there. Some other fucker can deal with that. What do they do if the bag splits when they are stretching it over the rim? Try again? Nah, it won't be them needing to sort out the waste after autoclaving, some other fucker can deal with that.

An autoclave bag full of dirty labcoats for autoclaving is CLEARLY visible up on the shelf, but somebody's still got out a fresh one for just their labcoat, and then tossed it on the side for some other fucker to work out. Too fucking thick and idle to even slightly incline their head upwards.

Liquid waste had it's own dixie near the autoclave. When I was running waste, I'd loosen the lids of the bottles and put them in there with it, sterilising all the category 2 bacteria inside, so the bottle could be safely tipped down the sink. We made sure things had been correctly autoclaved by using autoclave tape, which had stripes on it that turned back when heated to a high temperature.

However, the use of "tape" caused some interesting ideas in the minds of the thicks. If it's long and sticky, it must clearly be used to hold the lids on! Let's save Mike the onerous, exhausting task of loosening the bottle lids by leaving them loose all the time, and wasting loads of the none-too-cheap tape to hold them down! Yeah, he'll love that.

Well, I mean, these fuckers did consider walking two more steps, in order to put an empty box somewhere clean, to be a mighty task of herculean effort, so who's to blame them for assuming the same level of laziness in others?

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Yeah, yeah, thanks for that. Leaving bottles containing category 2 bacteria, in liquid culture, with the lids just loosely resting on top. What a brilliant and amazing idea, I can't possibly think of anything that might be wrong with that.

Still, it's better than the time some fucker put category 2 liquid waste in PAPER FUCKING BAGS and left it in the small, not-used-for-waste autoclave for me to discover... all down my jeans. Then he just looks at me like "tee hee I done a silly".

Ere look, somebody's used a sensible amount of tape for once... with a huge loop, and only a tiny piece actually stuck down. If they can't fuck it up one way, they'll fuck it up another, eh? They can't not fuck up.

What's this I see? Yet another long plastic pipette tip shoved in a biohazard bin, so it can poke out of, and tear, the thin, shitty, "eco friendly and money saving" bag?

Well, this lot are so busy you know. And new students come and go. Maybe they didn't know there was a special bin for those tips? Maybe there wasn't a special bin nearby, and they didn't have the time to go to another room and get one?

Or maybe they're so fucking thick, idle and clueless that they can't even take in information with their senses, then base logical decisions upon that infomation. Apparently this is one of the top institutes of learning and research in the entire country, and among the best in the world. You'd have thought they'd be capable of pattern recognition, wouldn't you? A fucking gorilla could work this out.

I'm sure this can pass without comment. Though, now that I think about it, maybe whatever this was belonged to the x-ray department, so this would be the correct usage. Though why the fuck it would be in one of the labs I worked in, which didn't ever require the use of x-rays, is beyond me.

An autoclave bag full of dirty labcoats for autoclaving is CLEARLY visible up on the shelf, but somebody's still got out a fresh one for just their labcoat, and then tossed it on the side for some other fucker to work out. Too fucking thick and idle to even slightly incline their head upwards. ...wait, didn't we have exactly the same thing a few pictures back? It's all so tiresome.

I kept leaving big cardboard boxes here, so that small boxes could be put inside them, and were thus easier to chuck away. What's some "helpful" fucker gone and done? Chucked the whole lot away (almost certainly in a non-recycling bin). Yeah, they loved "helping", except if that "help" would have meant walking two more steps out of their way, or differentiating between brightly-coloured objects, of course. Then it was far too much effort.

Mixed recyling and non recycling chucked in any random bin... same old, same old. Also a perfectly good bucket thrown out. That wouldn't have been useful for anything, then?

I must have got held up on doing liquid waste for a bit, maybe I used the big autoclave for media or something. Either way, what do we do if the dixie for liquid waste is looking a bit full? Apparently the correct answer is "precariously balance bottles containing contaminated, category-2 liquid waste in a teetering pile".

Or maybe the correct answer is "just put bottles of category 2 liquid waste on a small, wooden, easily-knocked table". I mean, it's not like putting those bottles in a steel bin serves any purpose, is it? It's just optional, it's just a container to indicate the vague area for liquid waste, isn't it? It has no purpose, does it?

Funny, I'd have thought the answer would be "leave the room, get another dixie, then put the overflow liquid waste in that". Yeah, imagine these fuckers making such a mighty effort of exertion.

Bottles with autoclave tape on them, put in the tray for dirty (but not contaminated) ((well, not badly contaminated)) glassware. So, what? What am I meant to do with these, precisely? Waste cycle them, or just wash them? Are they contaminated or aren't they? I wouldn't put it past some fucker to want them only washed, but to see that "finished" autoclave tape is on the clean glassware, and "helpfully" put it on the dirty bottles, before they go in the dishwasher. This is the level of "training" most new people got in this place, just dumped down and left to work out shit on their own. This was also near the small autoclave, so it genuinely wouldn't have surprised me if these were actually already-clean bottles, which somebody just wanted done on a plastics run. There was another, clean, tray for stuff like that next to the small autoclave... but to reach that would require walking FOUR MORE STEPS.

Due to a whole saga of fuckups told in another chapter, we had a very limited supply of dixies with big handles on, which were meant to be carried to some small labs with a lid securely clamped on. There were strict instructions issued to the thicks to not use the ones with handles in the main lab (guess what constantly happened?). Prior to this incident, I knew that one had not been used in the main lab, so this one had been bought back from an external lab...

The CLUELESS PIECE OF SHIT who bought it back then proceeded to TAKE OFF the clamp-on lid, and PUT IT BACK IN THE PILE OF CLEAN ONES. A lid which had BEEN IN DIRECT CONTACT WITH CATEGORY 2 WASTE was PUT BACK AMONG THE PILE OF CLEAN ONES. What the fuck? What could make a mind like this? How is it possible to think like this?

You'll notice it's on top of another dixie. This one obviously had the "internal" lid on it, so whichever piece of shit did this swapped the lids to "copy the pattern". Oh right, NOW we can do pattern recognition. NOW we can put things of the same shape and colour together. We can't do that when it's the right thing to do, but when it's a fuckup, THEN we can do it.

A black plastic bag of general office waste is full! What do we do now? We've vaguely overheard "waste goes in dixies to be autoclaved", so we fetch a dixie and autoclave bag, and PUT A BLACK BAG OF OFFICE WASTE IN IT. Paper! Pencil sharpenings! A Sainsbury's sandwich wrapper! Yeah, that sounds like stuff that needs sterilisation before it goes to landfill, doesn't it? What could make a mind like this? How is it possible to think like this?

Yeah nah thanks for flattening them down a bit, so they're easier to take out. At least, I suppose, they left them for me to take out, and didn't go and sling them in a non-recycling bin.

I bet there's a story here...