I’m really bummed out today and this post will kind of be a rant. As with most biochemical scientists I have a lot of temperature-sensitive materials kept in a -80 degree freezer box. Pretty much all my work since I started this job is kept in that box, along with samples sent to me by collaborators. Well over the winter break, a certain someone (I won’t name who, but I know who) decided to clean out the freezer, and they apparently didn’t read MY INITIALS which were written on my box, so they thought my box belonged to someone else who no longer works here and they tossed it. All my research products, gone. Half my samples from collaborators, gone. My only solace is that I still have collaborator samples LEFT, at least I still have something kept in separate boxes only for organization reasons, but still the loss of all that work is really making me not want to do any more work today or maybe ever. And it isn’t even someone I know really well who did this, I don’t know if that makes it better or worse. It’s someone I know, I’ve been to lab parties with them, but I struggle to think of their face from memory.

I’ll need to take stock of how far this has set me back. I need to contact collaborators to get new samples if possible. I especially need to strongly remind them that this wasn’t MY fault, although I worry that a petty collaborator might be furious enough to break off contact over something like this and blame me anyway. Most of all I need to make a plan to go forward. I haven’t been the MOST successful at my craft, like I said previously I still don’t have an extraction protocol that works every time, but I need to find some way to do things after this. At least it’s the weekend tomorrow, I can discharge over the weekend and hope to come back with something, but I think today is a lost day for science. I just can’t get myself in the mood to do work after discovering this.