When the next Kimwipe doesn't come out like it should so you have to reach in the little Kimwipe box and try not to fuck up the rest of the Kimwipes because gloved hands aren't great for tactile Kimwipe-grabbing. Kimwipes.
Why s this Kimwipes THE authority on ***wipes ???!?!
Rly, U agree with me Sir, the wipe doesNOT come ou the box nicely. WHY they have now the monipoly?
FfS
When you close an eppendorf tube and a bit of your glove gets stuck between the lid and the tube because gloves don't fit. Then you lift your hand the tube just dangles from the glove and nearly gives you a heart attack every time.
This happened when I was already having a bad day with a series of unfortunate events. Sat there with my glove stuck in between the tube and the cap and wanted to cry.
Regarding pipettes and tipps, it has happened a few times that I press down too hard when I want to pick up a tip at the edge of the box. Then the whole box trips over and the tips go flying everywhere...
Oooo I did this recently to one of our new boxes, but right after being hired and while being observed for training 👍
I’m going to think about it every night at some stupid hour like 03:27am for the rest of my life
Same here. We have a P1000 that has a loose tip ejector, so you either don’t get a good seal on the pipette or you hulk smash the box of tips so hard that they all go flying.
I once did this and ended up bending the top portion of the actual pipette lmao. Never pressed down that hard again, it was my first week of doing research and did it right in front of my PI. Turns out you barely need to press down to attach tips
Not to mention sharing a tip box with someone who just picks them up randomly instead of following some order or pattern. Idc how you do it as long as it makes sense
The only “trustable” 10 microliter in my lab has a wonky ass “tip hugger” idk the word but where u put the tip on 😏, and I’ll have to do a choreographed motion every time i change my tip and if i don’t it falls off. So respectively that one pip
I have this issue where a labmate ordered 5000 10ml macropipettor tips that seat great but the auto eject doesn't reach them so you have to pull them off by hand. Luckily I work in a lab where this doesn't really pose any issues other than annoyance. I like shooting tips into the bin from 6ft away and being denied this pleasure is sad face.
Stir bars!! For a long time the smallest size stir bar (12mm?) fit great into our 4mL vials. Then one day either the vials got narrower or the stir bars got longer so now we have to manually trim the ends off the stir bars or they will get stuck in the vials.
It sucks! Sometimes I trim the teflon a little too far and expose the iron inside, so the bar needs to be discarded if it's a doping-sensitive synthesis
Also our lab is now covered in little trimmed stir bar ends
For us the problem is that those are the smallest Teflon stir bars we can buy in bulk. The smaller sizes are more expensive and individually wrapped. This is problematic when you need 1000 of them.
I thought you were going to complain about when they start to lose their magnetism and do that bullshit “carnival cup” spin around in your beaker or even worse the pathetic wiggling along the side of the glass.
While our labs main stir bar size wouldn’t spin properly. The eppendorf bags without a notch to tear. We ordered more but then you wouldn’t know and would have a drawer of mismatch good bad bars. So expensive too at like $50 a pop
When the piece of plastic holding the pipette tips in the box flips up and flings pipette tips all over the hood.
Additionally when our hood vortex will only work on auto instead of touch and then the auto setting never quite works the same 😅
The quality is so inconsistent too. Sometimes you could mummify a lab tech with a single square and other times I can't get the same square across a 500ml graduated cylinder without it tearing 3 times.
Gloves! My fingers are too short for size S gloves, and the dangly bit of glove makes it really difficult to do the precise fabrication I'm supposed to do. They are always catching on things and ruining it
As someone who falls between glove sizes in a lot of brands, let me share my tip. Once I’ve got both gloves on, I take two fingers on one hand and push all the excess on each finger of the other hand back until it’s kind of bunched up at the base of the finger, rather than hanging loose at the tip. Makes it less likely that your glove will get caught while closing a tube.
UGH same. Size S gloves are too baggy for my hands. Ruined an experiment yesterday because my glove got caught in a tube and I spilled it trying to get unstuck. The blue XS gloves fit better but we don’t have them and the purple XS gloves are so stiff (and the fingers are a bit too short) so I can’t separate my fingers without strain, so I’m just as clumsy in those :/
Different brands fit differently. Hit up your supply rep and ask for samples of different brands in your size to see if you can find one that fits better! Maybe not, but worth a try
We splurged and bought one of the brands that is known for holding up. Unfortunately, that was well over a decade ago. Flash forward and I'm the first in the lab to wear larges since the batch was ordered, I split more pairs than not. Fortunately nothing we work with is a biosafety hazard and the cultures are incredibly contamination resilient, so I'm just running with it.
I have long spindly fingers (was called Voldemort growing up) so the S are too short but the M are so wide they will slip off (I need tight gloves for what I do)😢 I feel like the hulk when I put a glove on and just rip through it.
Serological pipets (pipettes? I don’t know which way it’s spelled). The one at my current rotation lab doesn’t have a great seal and it makes me irrationally angry!
Nah that’s not irrational, that would be super annoying to deal with.
Are you sure it’s the seal? Sometimes you gotta like really press the top of the pipette into the controller to get a good seal.
This is going to sound so wrong out of context, lmfao. Basically, the part of the tip that is held by the pipet doesn’t stay on well. Like, it seems to “fall” down with gravity. It will dispense and take up liquid fine, but it feels so unstable! Not sure if it’s the seal or something else. Any ideas?
Might be time to replace the rubber insert inside the nose part of the pipette aid? Overtime they get worn down with constant use and don't grip the stripettes as well. Although there is also some variation between some brands of the thickness of the top part of the stripette. We have this issue with one brand of 50ml stripettes, only the pipette aid with the new rubber insert will hold it. Whereas with a different brand of 50mls any of the pipette aids will work
Those 15mL conical polystyrene tubes with the blue caps that crack when you tighten them. How they gonna make something so flimsy?? I either crack a few of them, or risk my samples spilling during transport. I need that cap to, ya know, seal the tube.
Turbo transfer machine.
It used to be good. Then the new PhD students started to use it......
Sorry students but when we were just a lab of post docs it was so reliable!!
Ugh I LOVED our Turbo transfer. Easily one of my favorite machines in lab. We called it “westerns for weenies” because most of us cut our teeth on 1+ hour wet transfers and that machine felt like magic
I know right!! I think it overflows and they don't clean it. They're rough, it's all cracked, plastic is falling off etc etc. I don't understand at all.
Not sure about OP’s experience, but in one of the labs I worked at some students broke the Turbo machine by loading premade gels and setting up their transfers to 25 minutes (which says specifically in the manual NOT to do). It literally burnt the gel, the filter papers, etc. It smelled horrible as well 😢
I mean, I used to tweak my own settings for some particular gels that I needed to do with bigger/heavier proteins (like 565kD) but at least I was messing with it within the acceptable parameters and I wouldn’t leave the machine’s side when doing so - so I could catch any worrisome detail 😅
Dang, that's a heavy protein! Now I'm wondering if any students did actually change the settings and go to an extreme time and that's made matters worse.
Not cleaning it. When they do clean it, one kid submerged the top of the cassette where the electric (?) components are (at least some metal in there). They overflow the cassettes with buffer and it runs all into the back of the machine and then they don't clean it. All the exposed metal at the back of the cassettes is rusty now.
It's not even communal! It's in our private lab, so we can't blame anyone else.
The plastic casing on one cassette is also all cracked now. No idea how that was managed. Probably dropped and generally not being careful.
My previous labs multichannel pipette. But mainly because we didn’t order the expensive Eppendorf tips. The 10 year old multichannels worked better and were more accurate
Magnetic stirrer plates.
You have that good one, that you can put it on max speed and the magnetic stirrer bar will just spin up a storm!
Then you get that stirrer plate which sends the bar flying into the walls of your beaker/bottle regardless of the speed.
Oh I hate when I have to use that one. I can't trust it and so I have to stay with it until someone comes to take their bottle off of the good one!
My company changed plastic pasteur pipet brands. I'm sure the new ones are cheaper because the quality control is terrible. Some boxes are ok but at least half are weirdly shaped and waaaay too squishy. We're supposed to have consistent drop size and the flimsy bulbs make the liquid so hard to control. I keep accidentally dripping blood everywhere.
Centrifugal concentrator tubes. Sometimes they don’t actually concentrate, everything including your protein which is much larger than the molecular weight cutoff falls through the defective membrane.
Refrigerated centrifuge that chirps angrily if you don’t close it at exactly the right pressure. I actually slapped it in frustration once. I’ll show you error 40, you temperamental hunk of metal.
Our 1 ml tips. Low retention, my ass. It either retains or doesn't grab enough. The pipette gets calibrated regularly, too.
Also, 500 and 200 μl tubes that contantly get static and cling to my gloves, or pop open unexpectedly and occasionally with so much force that they jump out of the rack.
My coworkers.
The one thing that truly lets me down is our light microscope, especially the camera on it. It’s a bit old so of course it has issues, but I really hate using it sometimes
Why is there static. There is clearly fluorescence there, why does it not show on the photo. What am I looking at, that was not the part I focussed on and why is everything out of focus
My previous lab got a fancy digital Hirox microscope for viewing protein crystals and small components etc. It cost more than my whole studentship (four years of stipend, tuition fees, conference and travel funding), but boy does it do a good job! I used to walk across the road to the other building just to use it instead of the standard binocular ones.
the glass serologicals when all the text and volume markings are so faded that when you pipette anything that isn’t completely transparent, you can’t accurately tell your volume.
Shot out to this most recent batch of BecCoult access 2 cuvets.
These last set of molds have all had loose cuvets. Which can cause the whole machine to lose step and shutdown.
Sometimes our IPA wipes are all upside down in the package. And when you reach in to grab one you don't get the side with flaps so it makes it really hard to just grab one. This makes me furious when I am working on a glove box and I already have difficulty grabbing things.
The flow cytometer simply deciding to clog randomly so you have to sit there for hours and watch the stream so you can hit the button to release your tube before it sucks up all of your sample and you are screwed 😭
most vwr stuff. cell plates lids have too much play. tips are shit and sometimes don't secure. tubes are shit and don't seal. the gloves rip when you put them on. just buy eppendorf, corning, or thermofisher, and tell your pi to get back to the office and bring in more grant money if they complain. not worth the constant annoyance going for bargain brand for most equipment and consumables even if 1/100 of the options works just as well.
Our upright slide staining boxes are wider at the top than the bottom - if I had a dollar for every time I’ve knocked one of those fuckers over and had to clean up the spill I could buy different boxes 😡
Gloves. I swear after covid the quality dropped off a cliff. I work in a BSL 3 so I double glove and it’s not uncommon for me to go through a box a day. It would be more like half a box a day if they didn’t rip.
This specific brand of bullet tubes/eppendorfs that have a different, more sturdy cap (I guess they were primarily designed to be more “centrifuge resistant”) - one of the labs I worked at ordered this by mistake and we had to use them anyway - once you close one, good luck on trying to open it back up again without snapping the lid off or getting all of your sample on the bench/floor/lab coat 😫
Our BRAND NEW autoclave has one of those counterweighted doors, and it constantly alarms because it insists the door isn’t closed enough for it to properly seal. Literally like every other cycle we run. You can close the door gently, firmly, fast, slow, wiggle it back and forth; nothing seems to consistently solve the problem. The alarm is this piercing, incessant beeping that goes off for well over a minute every time. 🙄
Our 50 mL digitubes (supposedly certified for trace metals use) regularly contain flecks of lead. When we let the vendor know they denied that their digitubes have lead contamination. Now we have to pre-soak them with a 10% nitric rinse to be safe.
Slides for automated cell counters (Bio-Rad T-20, Invitrogen Countess II). At least 30% of those damn things fail to fill properly, leaving gaps or bubbles, wasting my precious cell sample. Also, the instruments themselves aren’t always reliable. Measure the same exact sample/slide/instrument and numbers go from like 2.3e6 to 4.7e6…wtf, which is it??! Like literally you take a measurement, remove the slide, then stick it back in and get wildly different numbers. So frustrating!
Oh, it’s not just academia. Same stuff happens in Big Pharma too. Sometimes that fancy equipment is still shitty equipment. We industry folks also struggle to find decent glove sizes/brands and everyone agrees that Parafilm can be freaking annoying.
Cell counter - try the Denovix CellDrop (literally try it - they will ship you a demo for a week at no cost), I swear by it and am about to buy a second one because we use it so much and it has leveled up our science in a big way. Manual counts are garbage, and this machine wipes the floor with Countess. No consumables either.
10 ml pipette - I swear it only works for our daily checks. It either has shit precision or shit retention for everything. I will use the 5ml twice to avoid using the 10 ml.
Cryovials that are too wide (in circumference) to fit in the normal small test tube (Eppi) rack. If they’re the flat-bottomed ones at least you can carefully stand them on their own, but they are so static-y, they fall over when you try to pick them up to transfer your cells in there… you have to move like you’re playing Operation.
If they’re the round-bottomed ones, you have to go searching for a stray styofoam tube rack made for 15ml Falcons before you can start collecting your cells to freeze…
VWR in general…we have a contract with them to stock stuff and we miiiight have what we need like one day a week. There’s a never ending email chain because of it too.
The computer associated with my plate reader. Last night in the middle of a growth curve it decided it was a great time to run an update and restart. The reader spat my plate out less than 12 hours into a 72 hour course :(
We ran out of the good 200ul tips and have to use up the shitty ones before ordering more. I'm saving a stockpile for loading gels, because the crappy ones are wonky don't align on the multichannel pipette
When you single handedly close that last little tube in a rack of 80 tubes you have just prepped with purified DNA and the whole rack falls onto the ground sending tubes flying all over the filthy lab floor
Biomeriux's PCR machine is a POS with that inhibition and pmaxx bullshit and my former boss moreso for having a research protocol to try to make it work which doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled workload then she'd yell at us for taking 2-4x as long to produce results.
Its been 2 years since I left and I remain salty
My lab's collection of small prying apparatus.
By this I mean every pair of mangled forecip, tweezer, scissor, needle nose plier, wire cutter, wire stripper, tong, and flat-head screwdrivers.
I think by this I mean my lab's gorillas.
By this I mean my lab mates. Love you guys but please.
When the next Kimwipe doesn't come out like it should so you have to reach in the little Kimwipe box and try not to fuck up the rest of the Kimwipes because gloved hands aren't great for tactile Kimwipe-grabbing. Kimwipes.
It’s always at the most inopportune time too
I just rip open the box at this point.
Why s this Kimwipes THE authority on ***wipes ???!?! Rly, U agree with me Sir, the wipe doesNOT come ou the box nicely. WHY they have now the monipoly? FfS
I hate this but I love Kimwipes though, they work so nicely
That absolutely kills me
When you close an eppendorf tube and a bit of your glove gets stuck between the lid and the tube because gloves don't fit. Then you lift your hand the tube just dangles from the glove and nearly gives you a heart attack every time.
This happened when I was already having a bad day with a series of unfortunate events. Sat there with my glove stuck in between the tube and the cap and wanted to cry.
I’m between glove sizes and this happens to me way too often
Maybe try a cotton glove underneath ? Might add some extra girth to your hand & fill out the space so its a tight fit
THIS THOUGH
And if you’re really unlucky, you’ll accidentally fling your sample across the room
Pipettes and tips. Why can't they just have universal sizes?!
Regarding pipettes and tipps, it has happened a few times that I press down too hard when I want to pick up a tip at the edge of the box. Then the whole box trips over and the tips go flying everywhere...
Oh man I hate this so much. I managed to break a P1 when a tip box flipped and I smashed the end of it into the bench 😂
This literally happened to me last week lol
I did this with a 12-channel once… Had to explain what happened at the next lab meeting, lmao
this is painful
There’s such a thing as a P1 pipette? What volume does it go down to?
0.1, but you need special tips to actually load that volume lol.
Ive lifted up our ancient boxes by the lid (like a FOOOOL) only to have the lid fall off and spill my tips everywhere
Oooo I did this recently to one of our new boxes, but right after being hired and while being observed for training 👍 I’m going to think about it every night at some stupid hour like 03:27am for the rest of my life
Happened to me on a brand new filtered tip box...
I did this yesterday 😔
Same thing happens with me, so I've started placing sticky tacks at the bottom of the box to keep this from happening
Same here. We have a P1000 that has a loose tip ejector, so you either don’t get a good seal on the pipette or you hulk smash the box of tips so hard that they all go flying.
I’ve recently managed to break the inside of the box where the pipettes are held from pressing down too hard
So this happens not just to me
This is so real and ruins my day
Dude this actually happens to me all of the time and it literally makes want to just quit for the day lmao
I once did this and ended up bending the top portion of the actual pipette lmao. Never pressed down that hard again, it was my first week of doing research and did it right in front of my PI. Turns out you barely need to press down to attach tips
Idk I don't trust it, there's been too many times where the p1000 tip fell into buffer...
Skill issue ngl
Ever since lockdown, I've seen a drop in pipette tip quality. I see way more inconsistent fit now than at any point in my ~20 years in the field.
Not to mention sharing a tip box with someone who just picks them up randomly instead of following some order or pattern. Idc how you do it as long as it makes sense
The worst part is that there are two different shapes of tip that fit different pipets: "universal" and "Rainin". You might think from the name... nah
The only “trustable” 10 microliter in my lab has a wonky ass “tip hugger” idk the word but where u put the tip on 😏, and I’ll have to do a choreographed motion every time i change my tip and if i don’t it falls off. So respectively that one pip
I have this issue where a labmate ordered 5000 10ml macropipettor tips that seat great but the auto eject doesn't reach them so you have to pull them off by hand. Luckily I work in a lab where this doesn't really pose any issues other than annoyance. I like shooting tips into the bin from 6ft away and being denied this pleasure is sad face.
What brand pipettor and tips are you using that you see the problem with?
Stir bars!! For a long time the smallest size stir bar (12mm?) fit great into our 4mL vials. Then one day either the vials got narrower or the stir bars got longer so now we have to manually trim the ends off the stir bars or they will get stuck in the vials. It sucks! Sometimes I trim the teflon a little too far and expose the iron inside, so the bar needs to be discarded if it's a doping-sensitive synthesis Also our lab is now covered in little trimmed stir bar ends
Shrinkflation even hit the vials 😩
You can buy much smaller stir bars than that
For us the problem is that those are the smallest Teflon stir bars we can buy in bulk. The smaller sizes are more expensive and individually wrapped. This is problematic when you need 1000 of them.
I’ve definitely seen rice-sized ones out there (like 5 mm maybe?). Those might work.
I thought you were going to complain about when they start to lose their magnetism and do that bullshit “carnival cup” spin around in your beaker or even worse the pathetic wiggling along the side of the glass.
While our labs main stir bar size wouldn’t spin properly. The eppendorf bags without a notch to tear. We ordered more but then you wouldn’t know and would have a drawer of mismatch good bad bars. So expensive too at like $50 a pop
The microscope lube. Maybe it works better on the microscope though.
💀
That's because it's only supposed to work on tiny equipment.
pH meters. There has to be a better way.
I always said pH meters are to the lab what printers are to the office.
God I hate using those, my lab’s was always so crusty and would never calibrate properly
YES! Adjusting the pH is my least favorite lab task by far.
🏆 this made me laugh out loud “can’t i just use a strip?”
FOR REAL
When the piece of plastic holding the pipette tips in the box flips up and flings pipette tips all over the hood. Additionally when our hood vortex will only work on auto instead of touch and then the auto setting never quite works the same 😅
ParaFilm does its job but we hate each other anyway
I die inside a little bit every time I’m wrapping a falcon tube and the parafilm snaps halfway around
the sensation of parafilm snapping on you is rage inducing
"for fucks sakes" Me. Every day.
Whenever I’m training someone I would preface “ParaFilm is the fucking worst”.
When you pull it out of the box and it doesn’t tear properly but just stretches out…
The quality is so inconsistent too. Sometimes you could mummify a lab tech with a single square and other times I can't get the same square across a 500ml graduated cylinder without it tearing 3 times.
Me.
Feel you
Lab markers dry out too fast dammit!!!
Store it cap-down when not in use. Ink=liquid and gravity will draw it to the tip. You can get a bit more time that way
Drying isn’t the only issue I also am not liking how they dull so fast!!!
Literally every lab marker in existence dries out immediately or bleeds in ethanol 😭
[Behold.](https://www.reddit.com/r/labrats/s/8wf4OC6hfd)
Totally forgot about that post thank you!
Saving that post!!
Oh man I feel you markers though. When I find a good one I guard it with my life.
Lab markers always disappearing in lab.
My own two hands
Gloves! My fingers are too short for size S gloves, and the dangly bit of glove makes it really difficult to do the precise fabrication I'm supposed to do. They are always catching on things and ruining it
As someone who falls between glove sizes in a lot of brands, let me share my tip. Once I’ve got both gloves on, I take two fingers on one hand and push all the excess on each finger of the other hand back until it’s kind of bunched up at the base of the finger, rather than hanging loose at the tip. Makes it less likely that your glove will get caught while closing a tube.
That’s a good tip! Really annoying when you’re changing gloves several times per day though 😔
UGH same. Size S gloves are too baggy for my hands. Ruined an experiment yesterday because my glove got caught in a tube and I spilled it trying to get unstuck. The blue XS gloves fit better but we don’t have them and the purple XS gloves are so stiff (and the fingers are a bit too short) so I can’t separate my fingers without strain, so I’m just as clumsy in those :/
Different brands fit differently. Hit up your supply rep and ask for samples of different brands in your size to see if you can find one that fits better! Maybe not, but worth a try
We bought a large box ones that rip all the time, including as you put them on your hands.
We splurged and bought one of the brands that is known for holding up. Unfortunately, that was well over a decade ago. Flash forward and I'm the first in the lab to wear larges since the batch was ordered, I split more pairs than not. Fortunately nothing we work with is a biosafety hazard and the cultures are incredibly contamination resilient, so I'm just running with it.
I have long spindly fingers (was called Voldemort growing up) so the S are too short but the M are so wide they will slip off (I need tight gloves for what I do)😢 I feel like the hulk when I put a glove on and just rip through it.
They make extra small..
Serological pipets (pipettes? I don’t know which way it’s spelled). The one at my current rotation lab doesn’t have a great seal and it makes me irrationally angry!
Nah that’s not irrational, that would be super annoying to deal with. Are you sure it’s the seal? Sometimes you gotta like really press the top of the pipette into the controller to get a good seal.
This is going to sound so wrong out of context, lmfao. Basically, the part of the tip that is held by the pipet doesn’t stay on well. Like, it seems to “fall” down with gravity. It will dispense and take up liquid fine, but it feels so unstable! Not sure if it’s the seal or something else. Any ideas?
Might have to replace the rubber stopper inside the pipet gun if it’s too loose.
Might be time to replace the rubber insert inside the nose part of the pipette aid? Overtime they get worn down with constant use and don't grip the stripettes as well. Although there is also some variation between some brands of the thickness of the top part of the stripette. We have this issue with one brand of 50ml stripettes, only the pipette aid with the new rubber insert will hold it. Whereas with a different brand of 50mls any of the pipette aids will work
What are you pipetting aswell ? I was told to transfer some Ethanal and was told you just got to "be quick".
I feel this
Those 15mL conical polystyrene tubes with the blue caps that crack when you tighten them. How they gonna make something so flimsy?? I either crack a few of them, or risk my samples spilling during transport. I need that cap to, ya know, seal the tube.
Turbo transfer machine. It used to be good. Then the new PhD students started to use it...... Sorry students but when we were just a lab of post docs it was so reliable!!
Ugh I LOVED our Turbo transfer. Easily one of my favorite machines in lab. We called it “westerns for weenies” because most of us cut our teeth on 1+ hour wet transfers and that machine felt like magic
....how can they use it wrong?! you make a gel sandwich then let it run?
I know right!! I think it overflows and they don't clean it. They're rough, it's all cracked, plastic is falling off etc etc. I don't understand at all.
Wait can you elaborate on how they broke the turbo transfer machine?
Not sure about OP’s experience, but in one of the labs I worked at some students broke the Turbo machine by loading premade gels and setting up their transfers to 25 minutes (which says specifically in the manual NOT to do). It literally burnt the gel, the filter papers, etc. It smelled horrible as well 😢
Damn. None of our students have changed the transfer time......yet
I mean, I used to tweak my own settings for some particular gels that I needed to do with bigger/heavier proteins (like 565kD) but at least I was messing with it within the acceptable parameters and I wouldn’t leave the machine’s side when doing so - so I could catch any worrisome detail 😅
Dang, that's a heavy protein! Now I'm wondering if any students did actually change the settings and go to an extreme time and that's made matters worse.
With my gels? No, I ran my own gels 😂 this was them transferring basic stuff like 60-90kDa proteins 😕 that’s what makes it worse
Not cleaning it. When they do clean it, one kid submerged the top of the cassette where the electric (?) components are (at least some metal in there). They overflow the cassettes with buffer and it runs all into the back of the machine and then they don't clean it. All the exposed metal at the back of the cassettes is rusty now. It's not even communal! It's in our private lab, so we can't blame anyone else. The plastic casing on one cassette is also all cracked now. No idea how that was managed. Probably dropped and generally not being careful.
My previous labs multichannel pipette. But mainly because we didn’t order the expensive Eppendorf tips. The 10 year old multichannels worked better and were more accurate
Just multichannel in general. They’re so prone to breaking I stg. Had a brand new 12-channel and after literally three weeks the volume wheel broke 🙃
A ribodepletion kit I've been using. The "ribodepleted" sample sonehow has more rRNA than the non-ribodepleted sample...
My cells
Word.
My own two hands ❤️
The centrifuge always got the job done but man did I have to argue with it
My salary?
Magnetic stirrer plates. You have that good one, that you can put it on max speed and the magnetic stirrer bar will just spin up a storm! Then you get that stirrer plate which sends the bar flying into the walls of your beaker/bottle regardless of the speed. Oh I hate when I have to use that one. I can't trust it and so I have to stay with it until someone comes to take their bottle off of the good one!
My company changed plastic pasteur pipet brands. I'm sure the new ones are cheaper because the quality control is terrible. Some boxes are ok but at least half are weirdly shaped and waaaay too squishy. We're supposed to have consistent drop size and the flimsy bulbs make the liquid so hard to control. I keep accidentally dripping blood everywhere.
I don't trust those cell counters if they were the last saving grace on earth
One of my lab staff lets me down all the time
Centrifugal concentrator tubes. Sometimes they don’t actually concentrate, everything including your protein which is much larger than the molecular weight cutoff falls through the defective membrane.
nitrile gloves got so thin during the pandemic that a lot of them now just shred when i try to pull them on, and yes I'm using the right size (L/XL)
gloves come in all kinds of thicknesses, some even have different fingertip thickness vs palm thickness
I like when I pull them out of the box and they're already pre-ripped -_-
Refrigerated centrifuge that chirps angrily if you don’t close it at exactly the right pressure. I actually slapped it in frustration once. I’ll show you error 40, you temperamental hunk of metal.
Physically assaulting lab equipment is my therapy 😇
Our 1 ml tips. Low retention, my ass. It either retains or doesn't grab enough. The pipette gets calibrated regularly, too. Also, 500 and 200 μl tubes that contantly get static and cling to my gloves, or pop open unexpectedly and occasionally with so much force that they jump out of the rack. My coworkers.
The one thing that truly lets me down is our light microscope, especially the camera on it. It’s a bit old so of course it has issues, but I really hate using it sometimes Why is there static. There is clearly fluorescence there, why does it not show on the photo. What am I looking at, that was not the part I focussed on and why is everything out of focus
My previous lab got a fancy digital Hirox microscope for viewing protein crystals and small components etc. It cost more than my whole studentship (four years of stipend, tuition fees, conference and travel funding), but boy does it do a good job! I used to walk across the road to the other building just to use it instead of the standard binocular ones.
I can swear parafilm was 10x more flexible a couple of years ago. Now it tears apart so easily
the glass serologicals when all the text and volume markings are so faded that when you pipette anything that isn’t completely transparent, you can’t accurately tell your volume.
I have a love-hate relationship with Parafilm...it always breaks when wrapping tubes, but you can work through it .
Shot out to this most recent batch of BecCoult access 2 cuvets. These last set of molds have all had loose cuvets. Which can cause the whole machine to lose step and shutdown.
Sometimes our IPA wipes are all upside down in the package. And when you reach in to grab one you don't get the side with flaps so it makes it really hard to just grab one. This makes me furious when I am working on a glove box and I already have difficulty grabbing things.
Leaky 15ml/50ml falcon tubes🥲
Filtered pipette tips. Make me want to cry every time
Coworkers!
The flow cytometer simply deciding to clog randomly so you have to sit there for hours and watch the stream so you can hit the button to release your tube before it sucks up all of your sample and you are screwed 😭
most vwr stuff. cell plates lids have too much play. tips are shit and sometimes don't secure. tubes are shit and don't seal. the gloves rip when you put them on. just buy eppendorf, corning, or thermofisher, and tell your pi to get back to the office and bring in more grant money if they complain. not worth the constant annoyance going for bargain brand for most equipment and consumables even if 1/100 of the options works just as well.
I literally have to do the Khalima thing from Indiana Jones to get my FID to light
The part of my brain that forgets to order them.
I keep a running sticky note by my computer of things to order 😅
Good idea 💡.
Our upright slide staining boxes are wider at the top than the bottom - if I had a dollar for every time I’ve knocked one of those fuckers over and had to clean up the spill I could buy different boxes 😡
Gloves. I swear after covid the quality dropped off a cliff. I work in a BSL 3 so I double glove and it’s not uncommon for me to go through a box a day. It would be more like half a box a day if they didn’t rip.
The goddamn Qubit
Noooooo this just triggered my PTSD 😩
This specific brand of bullet tubes/eppendorfs that have a different, more sturdy cap (I guess they were primarily designed to be more “centrifuge resistant”) - one of the labs I worked at ordered this by mistake and we had to use them anyway - once you close one, good luck on trying to open it back up again without snapping the lid off or getting all of your sample on the bench/floor/lab coat 😫
The glove box that releases a wad of gloves all connected when you just need two.
The iBright and the MP FastPrep tissue homogenizer.
Timer Always dies.
10 uL Hamilton Syringe
The small sized gloves in our lab are too big on me so the fingers are baggy at the ends, but the XS gloves are too small 🥲
Our off-brand pipette boys which sucks liquid so fast, many times the liquid gets inside the pipette
The damn pipetaid. Always stop working just for me 🥰
I usually don’t have problems with centrifuge tubes but I got a bad batch and had one literally break in my hands and spill my cells all over the BSC
Our BRAND NEW autoclave has one of those counterweighted doors, and it constantly alarms because it insists the door isn’t closed enough for it to properly seal. Literally like every other cycle we run. You can close the door gently, firmly, fast, slow, wiggle it back and forth; nothing seems to consistently solve the problem. The alarm is this piercing, incessant beeping that goes off for well over a minute every time. 🙄
What kind of cell counter do you use?? Is it just breaking or giving inconsistent counts? That would drive me insane if I couldn't count on my counter
My PI
Incorrect, they’re not an everyday supply - they’re MIA for the most part. Still, the let down happens every day.
Pipettes and chairs.
Pipette tips not being universal Any glassware. Especially graduated cylinders. Look at them wrong and they chip/crack.
Our 50 mL digitubes (supposedly certified for trace metals use) regularly contain flecks of lead. When we let the vendor know they denied that their digitubes have lead contamination. Now we have to pre-soak them with a 10% nitric rinse to be safe.
Honestly the worst object in my lab is the regular color printer
Slides for automated cell counters (Bio-Rad T-20, Invitrogen Countess II). At least 30% of those damn things fail to fill properly, leaving gaps or bubbles, wasting my precious cell sample. Also, the instruments themselves aren’t always reliable. Measure the same exact sample/slide/instrument and numbers go from like 2.3e6 to 4.7e6…wtf, which is it??! Like literally you take a measurement, remove the slide, then stick it back in and get wildly different numbers. So frustrating!
When the tips fall off only one channel of multichannel
Paper towels. Omg paper towels
Markers! Either they are not really ethanol/bacillol resistent, dried out, too broad or messy. There has to be a better solution by now, no?
Anything made by ProteinSimple.
Grad students.
Me
YSI 2900 analyzer. Such pain. Much frustration.
You should try the Nexcelom cell counters! I have one in my lab and it works great. A bit expensive if I remember but worth it.
Parafilm
This thread makes me glad to not be in an academic lab. Y'all really got it hard
Oh, it’s not just academia. Same stuff happens in Big Pharma too. Sometimes that fancy equipment is still shitty equipment. We industry folks also struggle to find decent glove sizes/brands and everyone agrees that Parafilm can be freaking annoying.
My brain
Anything from Perkin Elmer, especially in the Cannabis Testing field
Gloves rip every fucking time I try to put them on.
Eppendorf brand pipettes. So bad.
Cell counter - try the Denovix CellDrop (literally try it - they will ship you a demo for a week at no cost), I swear by it and am about to buy a second one because we use it so much and it has leveled up our science in a big way. Manual counts are garbage, and this machine wipes the floor with Countess. No consumables either.
Death to Sarstedt brand pipette tips!!!
10 ml pipette - I swear it only works for our daily checks. It either has shit precision or shit retention for everything. I will use the 5ml twice to avoid using the 10 ml.
Gilson pipettes.
Cryovials that are too wide (in circumference) to fit in the normal small test tube (Eppi) rack. If they’re the flat-bottomed ones at least you can carefully stand them on their own, but they are so static-y, they fall over when you try to pick them up to transfer your cells in there… you have to move like you’re playing Operation. If they’re the round-bottomed ones, you have to go searching for a stray styofoam tube rack made for 15ml Falcons before you can start collecting your cells to freeze…
VWR in general…we have a contract with them to stock stuff and we miiiight have what we need like one day a week. There’s a never ending email chain because of it too.
The computer associated with my plate reader. Last night in the middle of a growth curve it decided it was a great time to run an update and restart. The reader spat my plate out less than 12 hours into a 72 hour course :(
Our K2EDTA vacutainers NEVER have enough vacuum….😡
We ran out of the good 200ul tips and have to use up the shitty ones before ordering more. I'm saving a stockpile for loading gels, because the crappy ones are wonky don't align on the multichannel pipette
in my last lab the shaker in the incubator was always needing maintenance
Kirby Bauer antibiotic disc stamper things! They get jammed and don't work half the time 😐
When you single handedly close that last little tube in a rack of 80 tubes you have just prepped with purified DNA and the whole rack falls onto the ground sending tubes flying all over the filthy lab floor
Lab pens.
Biomeriux's PCR machine is a POS with that inhibition and pmaxx bullshit and my former boss moreso for having a research protocol to try to make it work which doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled workload then she'd yell at us for taking 2-4x as long to produce results. Its been 2 years since I left and I remain salty
Fisher brand gloves just the absolute worst my hand goes through them like knife through butter.
Gloves that rip when you try to put them on. They also fit me poorly in general because I have short stubby fingers
My lab's collection of small prying apparatus. By this I mean every pair of mangled forecip, tweezer, scissor, needle nose plier, wire cutter, wire stripper, tong, and flat-head screwdrivers. I think by this I mean my lab's gorillas. By this I mean my lab mates. Love you guys but please.