I love grad school

I was going to blog about how I was only stuck in lab for an average of maybe 6 hours per day this weekend, and how I was able to get outside and actually feel the sun on my face for more than 10 minutes. But something happened yesterday afternoon that changed everything.

Our -80C freezer lost power sometime on Friday or Saturday, and when I discovered this yesterday it was at +1C. That is above freezing. That is very very bad.

The freezer is in a room separate from our lab, and is in such a place that if you weren't going to use it, you would have no idea if it were off or on. Well, Ed (my advisor) is attending a meeting in Japan; Victor (a fellow grad student) is in Canada renewing his visa; Amy (our lab tech) doesn't work on weekends. So it was just me, and I don't need to put things in or take things out of the -80 everyday. So the power loss went undetected until yesterday. (Fortunately, another lab on the floor had some space in their freezer, so about 25% of our stuff could be moved to another freezer immediately.)

This freezer stores most of our lab's experiments before they can be properly analyzed, as well as certain lab reagents and stocks of tissue. All of this needs to be stored at extremely cold temperatures. If not, it quickly becomes worthless. Some things cannot be thawed and refrozen, while some can. Experiments cannot be thawed and refrozen.

I only had 6 or 7 experiments waiting to be analyzed (as opposed to years of stuff, which some people keep in the -80). My experiments were hovering at the freezing point (their location in the freezer prevented them from thawing, so their status is questionable). If lost, it will take about 1-2 months to repeat those experiments, maybe longer for some. That's 1-2 months longer it may take me to graduate. Of course, I won't know if they are lost until I analyze them. If certain aspects of the analysis don't look completely normal, then I will have to trash the whole experiment and assume it is unsalvageable.

I will lose/have lost much more than that, but most of the stuff isn't too crucial, but will probably still require time in order to replace.

So everything I was going to do this week will be on hold while I try to ascertain what was lost and what wasn't. I'm not particularly hopeful, but I am trying to stay unbiased until I can analyze everything.

It looks like I may be graduating some time in the spring rather than this winter. Aaah, such is the life of a graduate student.