In my life I find that things usually turn out for the best despite my best intentions or stupidity. This follows through to the simple, but important things such as ordering supplied for my research. My current main project focuses on the study of phosphotyrosine signaling in human mammary epithelial cells under different growth factor stimulation conditions. Phosphotyrosine is a vital signaling mechanism, but there isn’t that much of it hanging around to measure. To get around this each condition I test we use 20-30, 100 sq. mm cell plates. Do five or 6 different conditions and you can see that you’re talking a ton of work for the person who grows up the cells (thanks again Lee!). All said it’s a good 3-4 weeks before you have the samples in a situation where they are stable enough to wait to do an immunoprecipitation (IP) and then LC-MS analysis. That said you can see why there is little room for error since it expensive and laborious to redo the experiments because of errors.
Ordering supplies is annoying. To fully appreciate my irritation I’ll explain how we order things at my company. There are two ways to order supplies . Anything that must be listed in the chemical inventory database is ordered through our online space and safety management system everything else is done on the old paper-based system. A few weeks back they changed the ordering policy and non-chemicals, like proteins and plasma, can no longer be ordered on the online system. The online system is usually faster and everything ordered through the system is sent to one person ina building who notifies you when your items comes in (after they’ve entered it into the inventory system). With the other ordering system the package is just dropped off to the room you specify with no notification that it’s arrived.
A few weeks ago I ordered my antibody. Yesterday I got a phone call from one of our sample prep staff members (she’s in the lab daily) saying a package had been on my bench for the last day. When I got down to the prep lab I found my antibody, at room temperature. This is death to an antibody. I called the company and the product manager confirmed my suspicions. So there was $1560 down the drain and I ordered 3 more boxes of 10 tubes. Later in the day I get an email saying that the price I listed for the antibody was for the small box of 5. I had specified the box of ten. I’d gotten the price from my previous order, which meant either I ordered the wrong box or who even input the order into the system made an error. When I went down to the lab and checked my antibody I found I had 15 botched tubes. So, had I not ordered more antibody I most likely wouldn’t have noticed that I only had half of the materials that I needed and I’d have 30 botched tubes instead of 15. It takes a least a week to get supplied in and it will take me 2 weeks to finish analyzing my experiments.
So, I wasted $1.5 K, but now I have everything that I need. At least it worked out in the end.
