Well lets restart this here science blog with a bit of science, whatdayahsay?

Ah science. I've been pretty fucking busy with it the past two years and also with the running about NYC and trying to not get killed (more on that later), but I did manage a few moments of what I do best. Fucking science up in a preposterously expensive way.

In deference to your feeble mortal brains, I'll be explaining these fuckups with as little actual science as possible. This is also handy because in the extremely unlikely event that someone from my job finds this blog and links me to it (Maybe I should go ahead and remove those photos now...) well then I won't have been passing on precious science secretes or secretions.

Good luck decoding my inconsistent and misleading metaphors!

So my most recent case of science fail has actually been ongoing for about 9 months, and was only discovered now because of an email I'd written to another lab. In a rough ranking of horrible stupidity I've inflected on my lab this ranks at least in the top three.

Roughly 1/3 of my time in the lab is spent working with mice. And the mice in our lab are an interesting bunch because they are immensely varied. Most of the breeds currently used are actually descended from mouse fanciers, circa the Victorian age. Those sexually frustrated gentlemen of that era, like our own, had the ability to devote stupid amounts of time to the most ridiculous of pursuits, be it lepidoptery, spanking, or animal breeding.

Why the hell am I talking about dear Queen Victoria, well mouse fanciers are pretty extinct by now but maybe you're all familiar with different breeds of dog. So, a chihuahua is unlike a Great Dane or a labradoodle but they're all still recognizably dog right? This is because even today a great deal of effort is taken to keep those breeds apart, efforts which occasionally fail:

Ok so the metaphors breaking down a bit but imagine it was really important that I breed about 300 Scottish Terriers. And I've been working on that since last September filling up our fucking what're they kennels? Ok, each Terrier gets food and water in his little kennel and he just sits there month after month shitting away our money. And then I'm told, well we've got plenty of Terriers, but you know what we need? Beagles. Call up this other lab and see if they'll send us some, coincidentally the same lab that gave us our Terriers originally.

And they will, god bless em, but as their version of me is checking over the paperwork I mailed em she picks something up. Something I'd missed for uh yeah exactly the past 9 months I'd been responsible for them dogs. Those terriers I was breeding? Yeah they were actually boxers. USELESS GODDAMN BOXERS!

So! Tomorrow I get to tell my big boss, about 3 levels above my normal boss, that the bitches I've been breeding are useless and also that the other lab can't ship us any Beagles OR Terriers for at least another month or two.

And I still don't think I'm gonna be fired. Because it's still not as bad as the worst thing I've done in this lab. But that is a tail for another time.