Top 10 Signs You're Spending Too Much Time in the Lab

Ben Ferguson -- 10. During dinner, your fiancee reflexively asks whether you’re going back again tonight.

9. You come across seemingly random numbers, but to you they are far from random: They are the number of amino acids in your protein of interest (987), or the first page number of the landmark paper you read (again) that morning ($4.02), or the recipe for your cells’ media (449,501).

8. You feel naked without your gloves on and generous amounts of alcohol sprayed all over them. Surely you’ll contaminate something.

7. You develop a giant blister on your thumb from too much pipette use—”pipette thumb.”

6. You’re so tired/distracted/sick of loading plate after plate that you can barely insert a multichannel pipette into a set of strip tubes without hitting the top, so you decide to get some coffee. An hour later, you’re so jittery that you can barely insert a multichannel pipette into a set of strip tubes without hitting the top, so you decide that “some coffee” probably shouldn’t mean three cups in a row in the future.

5. You don’t know how you could possibly get through loading another plate without listening to the latest "Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!" podcast.

4. You become genuinely miffed when your lab switches from one pipette brand to another, signaling that fact that your life revolves around the differences between little pieces of molded plastic (and is more or less over).

3. Finding a good spot to hide your stash of pipettes is probably the most excitement you’ve had all week.

2. You know the catalog number for 96-well plates by heart.

1. When you have some free time, you write a blog post about how much time you’ve been spending in lab.