Thursday, September 21, 2006

I Just Want to K*** People

You can make up your own mind about which 4 letter K-word that is after you read my entry.

Today I had microlab and we were doing some Grams Stains. I'll quickly sum up what Gram Stains are.
Gram positive basteria: look purple
Gram negative bacteria: look pink

I was making my gram negative slide and everything was going swell. I followed the procedure and life was grand. Then I tried to find the bacteria under the microscope and I was having a hard time focusing on the bacteria. They weren't that colorful and it was hard to get a crisp image of them. My professor told me that they weren't looking right and I should make them again. But he wasn't able to tell me where I went wrong.

OK, fine. I just made another and let the Safarnin sit a little longer. I went through the process again just to realize that I forgot to heat fixate. That basically means that all of my bacteria were in the dye tray after I washed them off the slide 4 different times. Little annoying, whatever. I went and made a third one. They looked exactly the same and the TA and professor still had no idea what was going on. Uggggh.

I do it a fourth time and no dice. The professor then looks at them under a different microscope and what a surprise, they looked perfect. There was no reason to have done it four times. He was just being a jerk and not letting the non-perfect slide.

I moved on to doing a Gram positive. The TA took a look at it and told me that my bacteria weren't distributed well enough. Are you serious?!??!?!?!?!? Well I'm sorry if there mothers didn't teach them how to be more evenly distributed.

By this point I had had it. I declared that I was going home, which wasn't that outrageous since the lab period had been over for ten minutes. (Note: I only got half of my work done, whereas many other were on the verge of being done.) So I'm going to pick up my dye tray which is overly full from having to repeat making a slide 4 times. Guess what happened. Actually, no. I'll just tell you the end result. My shoes and brand new jeans that were amazzzzzing now have crystal blue dye, safaranin, Gram iodine and decolorizer all over them. Yeah, that's never going to come out.

Everyone was on alert not to go anywhere near me. My professor thought it would be a good idea to make small talk by saying, "Hey Dr. Wannabe, wasn't it funny how all those slides you made were fine and just looked lighter under your microscope."

::people running for cover:: ::crickets::

"Yeah, it was really funny."
I don't think I need to tell you that I said that in the most sarcastic asshole voice ever. I was actually quite impressed that I had the balls to speak to a professor that way.

Microbiogy hasn't officially become my least favorite class of the semester.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm impressed...

Anonymous said...

with?

btw - i was very thrown when i saw your comment. i thought someone had gotten onto my name for a second.

Anonymous said...

I took a microbiology class as an undergrad as my math requirement. We were playing around growing different types of bacteria on petrie dishes and like a dork, I rubbed my eye. I got a raging eye infection and told my professor I had e-coli in my eye! He told me I was over reacting and there was no way I got a bacterial eye infection from class. Later that week we got to swab anything we wanted to see if we grew anything. Well, I swabbed my eye and guess what I grew? I felt vindicated, but it still sucked. Eventually, I went to the doctor and got an erythromycin eye ointment. The doctor was quite impressed with my story. FYI - we swabbed money and didn't grow anything. The men's bathroom floor on the other hand was a whole other story!

Anonymous said...

that sucks. your life might actually POSSIBLY have been worse than mine. for that day only, of course. I've been compared to Dr House before. however I am nowhere near as brilliant as he. kudos on the talking back, though. some of those profs deserve some snark once in a while.