0 comment Tuesday, June 10, 2014 | admin
I thought it was just allergies, and I thought that I had finally exorcised the science demons after toiling through my Week of Epic Fuck-Ups (you've filled your quota for the year bitches, so go mess with somebody else). This week has gotten off to a better start for sure, but I was wrong about at least one of those things.Today I am a walking mucus factory. The allergies, as expected, have weakened my immune system such that I am now susceptible to the Lab Plague. It goes around here every year. I always starts with the parents. I can't really blame them; it's not their fault. It's just that kids are little disease vectors, especially if they spend most of their day in what should be categorized as a BSL-4 facility (a.k.a., DayCare). Don't get me wrong, I like kids. I just don't like getting their sickness. Half the parents in my lab have been sick for over a week. One of them just had to cancel her talk because she's lost her voice. I wish that they would a) stay at home when they're sick so as not to give it to the rest of us, b) keep the kids at home when they're sick so as not to perpetuate the germies. But I also know why they're here. The desperation of losing experimental time to something as mundane as the flu keeps them coming in. I shouldn't judge though. I'm here too for the very same reasons.If I had any sense I'd go home. I'm not doing the experiment that I had planned for today because I know that there is no way in hell that I can get through it without sneezing tons of RNase into all my solutions and ruining the whole damn thing. That would be a total waste of 4 very labor-intensive days, not to mention the time it would take to make up all new solutions. Instead I'm catching up on my backlog, which also needs doing, but not as much as that damn in situ. I wish I was at home asleep and I can't help but wonder if that would render me more productive over the long run than trying to work through this and prolonging the symptoms.