I think when you are working in any kind of physical laboratory, it has an interesting effect of making you feel self conscious, or humbled, or both, about your intrinsic human clumsiness with regard to manipulating the real world. Or maybe that's just me, honestly.
But when I'm in the lab, I feel like (am direly familiar with the fact that) even one careless spasm-flick of the wrist is enough to ruin everything. And the thing is, I kind of just like flail around all the time. Sometimes for fun, sometimes because I'm bored, sometimes idk, I'm busy thinking or something. I think because when you're sitting at a desk, as one does in the ivory tower, you can kind of just derp around all you want because everything is in idea-land, you can't break math or writing by sitting in your chair funny. Worst thing you can do is fall asleep at your desk and get drool on your notebook. I did that on Thursday this week.
What I mean is like knocking glass and shattering it, spilling liquids, destroying hard work, contaminating something because your hand isn't that good at holding steady, like dropping the thing in the thing (oops), or like poking past the electrophoresis gel something something now it's an ugly mess, poking the colony wrong or something (screw colonialism anyway), and then like taking too long so now the stupid microbes from the air are contaminating your thing even though you swear you were being careful and using a flame and, sigh, idk.
The humor is that a laboratory is an academic place where all the bookworms can descend from the ivory tower and face their worse enemy slash greatest weakness (clumsiness) face-to-face, by making a mess of things worse than a zebra in a hospital. Or is it just me?
And all that's apparently par for the course, but maybe at some point we can just admit genetics is an input which might make me more par for the course in this particular axis? Clumsiness.
One time, in a plant biology lab, I got put on "seed duty." I made up that term, but I got paid to winnow seeds from the teeny tiny Arabidopsis plants and put them into envelopes. Make sure the mesh is perfectly clean via ethanol between each threshing (winnowing? Idk i'm not a farmer) so that the gene lines aren't interfering. It's very repetitive. Though a lot of labwork is like that anyway. It's definitely a different type of work than usual for someone whose area of study was not biology but computer science, but ultimately I signed up for bio lab work and know that tedious things come with the territory (are typically not even worth mentioning, let alone complain about). It was sufficiently noble work in my eyes because it genuinely freed up the professor to do higher productive tasks or they otherwise would have had to do this themselves (genuinely, it's nice to have clear counterfactual impact).
I call it "seed duty" because I got reassigned to "seed duty" after previously having had the opportunity to do sexy bacterial genetic engineering instead. And being reassigned was definitely not to be taken personally (that is the most oatmeal truthful version of the story), and I know that---it's just being reassigned to what the professor most needed help with---but given my historical caricature of extreme clumsiness (which I had not yet revealed to this lab; the other stuff was in classroom labs and other labs), I simply couldn't help but wonder whether I had been assigned seed duty because I was too clumsy for anything but.
One time Professor walked by and at quick glance mistook a box of empty (spare) envelopes for the box of finished (seed-filled) envelopes, and since the box of empty envelopes arbitrarily had all its envelopes upside down, they asked, calmly, "(Omg) Are all the envelopes upside down??" ("Are all of the progeny of these plant lines I painstakingly modified and raised completely mixed up and ruined?!"). And I quite jitteringly reassured Professor, "No, those are empty envelopes. The seed envelopes are over here." And Professor thought nothing else of the situation and moved on. But the reason I felt a little queasy afterwards was because I think putting the envelopes upside down in the box (the envelopes are unsealed) is something I might totally be capable of. It's not that Professor thought I was particularly incompetent and thus more likely to manifest this failure, but still I felt bad because I felt like I might have been deserving of such a disdain. For seed duty, of all things. It's most likely that perhaps all humans are highly capable of simple mistakes ruining experiments in labs, as my much more experienced biology friends reassure me, but it's remarkable because when you're in the shoes of it all it feels like, wow, why do I have to be so paranoid-detailed in the lab all the time? Is it because I am just a newb or because I intrinsically suck?
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