The Week That Was...

The blogging world has been rather quiet recently... Well, the siblings have been busy: One is counting down night shift... Another is counting down grants... And one is kicking sequined butt!

Given the lack of blogging I felt I should venture out and put fingers to keys... Much like a movie premiering in the off season, this post will end up looking better than if it was put up against some competition...

It's been a strange and busy week:

On Tuesday I discovered that a postdoc from a collaborating lab is (at least partially) incompetent. A quick protein chemistry lesson: To determine the concentration of a protein solution, you measure it's absorbance at 280nm. As all proteins are different, you then us a correction factor (called an extinction coefficient) to determine the actual concentration.

So what's the problem? Well for the past two and a half months I've been doing experiments with proteins that this postdoc had purified. By chance I checked the concentration of one of these proteins on Tuesday, only to determine a very different concentration! Reviewing the protein notes I discovered the postdoc had failed to use an extinction coefficient when determining the protein concentrations! She had done so on 4 different proteins that I have been using. While it has been possible to re-analyze all the data, it is safe to say that I was not amused! I rang her lab to explain the problem (she didn't seem to see what was wrong) and talked to her a second time shortly afterwards when she rang back to give me the "corrected concentrations" (I have measured them all myself and I'm using my own numbers). After the second phonecall a graduate student in the lab said it was remarkable that I had remained so calm on the phone...

On Friday my boss lost some papers. I have recently cleared out a number of references that an old postdoc had left behind, so the boss assumed I had thrown his papers out! After getting rather snotty with me he appeared from his office 10 minutes later to remark: "Here they are! Right where they should have been. I just kept missing them!"...

On Wednesday I applied for my new job (they finally posted it!)! The emailed me Thursday to say they got the application and that they would schedule an interview shortly...

One of our graduate students had a horrid week at work. Friday afternoon, her husband showed up out of the blue with a dozen of the largest and yummiest cup cakes I've ever seen.

"This is because your week sucked" he said. "You can share them with the others if you want!"

It's been a strange week...