Heather Doran

It's Friday and although I will be working over the weekend, I am feeling pretty cheerful. Lab life can get you down sometimes, a never ending stream of failed experiments, things to do, late nights, early mornings and a lack of appreciation. Personality clashes, politics and unwanted work are themes from any work life. But, sometimes, labs can be the most fun place to be, a source of comedy, fun and practical jokes.  Here are some things that have made me SMILE and kept me HAPPY over the past 2.5 years. The people you work with can keep you going.  Please share your sad times and good times (practical joke tales encouraged) and keep laughing. When it all goes horribly wrong (does it get any worse than boiling western blots with students?!).......   Someone might give you a special gift   Look away!   You might win a prize   Supervisors can make or break you....   Someone always has cake   You never know when

Working in a laboratory can be stressful, and cause tension (see my post about lab post-it notes and the radio ). Can new technologies help make life easier, by saving time and enabling easy sharing of work? Or is sticking with old-fashioned paper methods better? ( I have already posted about how I like the idea of e-lab books) I get really annoyed that labs are at the forefront of new discoveries, new science and THE FUTURE, but often work in an old-fashioned way with paper notes and old equipment (my computer is currently on its last legs, I am pretty sure it isn't going to survive 'the thesis'). In the lab I work in, we are pretty old-school. Order numbers and prices are found on a computer, written down on paper and then put back in a computer. Excel files and written lists are used to keep track of what comes in and where it is kept in the lab, but these are not available to update on a computer. But saying all this, in general, it seems to work well.. so why c