It's been quiet here for a few days. I've been visiting my Grandma (the coolest woman in the world and a 94 year old botanist) in Copenhagen and came back to a lot of lab work, so it's been very busy.
These two weeks have been dedicated to flow cytometry experiments, and hopefully that's all the flow I'll be doing for a long time. The plan is to begin qPCR analysis and animal experiments before April, so I'm very eager to finish the flow cyt experiments by next week.
The flow cytometer that I use is shared between several labs and therefore we have a small calendar that's used for booking the instrument. As I once was late with the booking and had to postpone two experiments, I've been very careful with the planning and booking ever since.
Unfortunately, as everyone at the university is extremely busy at all times, student courses are always difficult to plan and the details are never down until the very last minute. Turns out this is not easily combined with a shared instrument. After the experiment on Monday, I checked the booking calendar and found that two of my bookings for next week had been crossed out because one of those difficult-to-plan lab courses. The engineer responsible for the instrument is the teacher for this course and she told me they needed it at exactly the same time I need it.
I got really angry when I discovered it, especially since no one informed me or talked to me about moving my experiments. As I'm really tired these day (and I'm a girl) I also felt completely lost, sick, sad and all those other things you feel when everything seem to fall apart at once - even when you know nothing is really falling...
After talking with my supervisor, who I think I woke up at 2.30 am while on holiday in Thailand, I decided to postpone my experiments and do the flow cyt in the evening/night. It's difficult to know how to deal with this kind of situations when you're still so green in science. When do you fight for an instrument that you actually booked first and when do let others have it?
Again, as the student courses are notoriously difficult to plan, I guess we should all help out
- but I wish they'd told me in stead of crossing out my name in the calendar
