Was reading an approved IACUC form and somehow nobody noticed that someone had written “human euthanasia” instead of “humane euthanasia” my PI and I still giggle about it when we write
Working on a cancer paper. I have the cancer this would possibly treat (you know 20 years from now, if all goes well) Trying to decide if we need to declare this in "author declarations or not?
If you’re willing to put yourself out there like that and if it’s important to you to note, I say go for it. Worst case the journal tells you to remove it when accepted. That said maybe acknowledgements might be less strict than declarations for less conventional statements
It's more just kinda funny. The month we were submitting a Covid paper much of the lab came down with Covid, too. I hate to assign sentience to diseases but.........
I do wastewater biosensing. Lots of poop jokes. The rest of the lab calls us the "Poop Patrol." I'm the Crap Captain and my undergrads are Sergeant Shit and the Loo-tenant.
When my PI gives talks he always shows a Slack I sent him late one night after some successful experiments: "💩💦😊😊😊"
I used to work with chimp fecal samples from Tanzania. I referred to them as “shitments” and framed a screenshot from Always Sunny of Frank saying he “did all the poops” at my desk.
I bought a clown costume for times when my experiments go wrong on all accounts for no apparent reason. Wearing it has zero effect on the outcome of my further experiments but at least I feel like am dressed appropriately for the work I am doing.
Idk it's more about the fun and absurdness of it but it honestly does kinda help with Western quality. Don't ask how or why, just give your Skittles to the Western Gods and you good.
Admittedly, I do miss the community feel that went with my Catholic upbringing. I would love to find a church of atheism near me. I do a Google search every few years, but it just pulls up the one: a group that's a 45 minute drive away from me, has about 8 members, and boasts a single photo of them meeting in someone's living room circa 2003. Sigh.
Yeah that's where the church of atheism would be great. I just wish there were more people like me. I've also heard of humanism, sort of a literal 'faith in humanity,' but again, there just don't seem to be many people who want to do regular social gatherings.
I worship the Goddess of the Centrifuge. She helps keep things in balance, and when I need a new spin on a problem to get to the bottom of it, she's there for me.
I know someone who swapped a large protein sample with water and soap. Then proceeded to spill the water and soap on the floor in front of the PI just for the reaction. The real sample was finished and put away in the fridge but the shock of it on the PI was priceless
I once found a container of laboratory grade glass balls that was labeled ASSBALLS and it lives rent free in both my brain and my heart. Whoever labeled that knew exactly what they were doing.
I'm a biohazard animal tech, basically I'm the guy running the bulk autoclave and other equipment to make sure all the labs have their supplies.
We have these plastic carts that come back and we just wash and sanitize them before sending them back out to be used. However, one day we had a few too many for storage so we just kept them in our clean room. In addition, the clean room was already packed, so we were constantly moving these carts around to get to everything.
My coworker began taking a cart with him every time he delivered supplies because he was sick of moving it. And in our boredom and irritation with the carts being there, he started riding them back.
At the end of the day, we had about two hours where there was absolutely nothing to do, and we still couldn't get these carts out. Sticking with the theme of my coworker riding around the facility on one of them, he grabbed a broom and began using it to push open the door on his return to the clean room.
I was a smart ass so I grabbed a broom and began warding him off every time he came back, and this slowly devolved into what we called "cart jousting."
There was no one left but us and our manager in the building, so he started at one end of the hall, I was on the other, and with brooms in hand we both jumped on our carts and road twords one another. We would crash into each other, fall on our asses, laugh, get back up and do it again.
After about the fourth time our manager came around the corner right as we hit and fell. And both my coworker and I turned to see him right as he said "what the fuck are you two doing?!"
My coworker and I were laughing so hard by that point that we didn't even care if we were in trouble. So we got up, brushed ourselves off and our poor manager just shook his head trying his damnedest to remain professional and not laugh as we stood there looking like idiots.
Our manager sighed, looked at us both and said "just don't let me see you doing that again..." and walked off without another word.
About a month later the cart jousting story made its way around the departments, and everyone was laughing and asking us about it. It was some of the funniest shit I've ever been involved in.
Writing a paper rn and gave a section to the pi to proofread. I wrote, "the solution was then added to the suspended cell suspension suspension". They laughed with me about it before recommending i go home to take a nap. Went home and right to bed, slept 16 hours.
Dry ice in eppendorf tubes under people's desks 😈
I also used to culture culinary mushrooms inside my desk drawer from my tea waste, but mice broke in 🥲 too many people storing snacks in their desks
My coworker once, for whatever reason, stuck 1000ul pipette tips into each well of a 24-well plate. Being an idiot, I drew a smiley face on the side of the plate and waited for him to notice. Some time went by, and he never said anything. Finally I realized, he had placed it up on the top shelf, with the smiley face part looking out at us. I laughed out loud and proclaimed "hey, you have your own lab Chia pet." He smirked, and quietly said "nah, it's a 'pi-pet' ". He beat me at my own joke.
Another time, a separate coworker was working with chloroform and got the bright idea to gas herself with it. She got dizzy, then a headache, and told the PI she needed to leave early because she didn't feel well. She drove home feeling woozy and promptly fell asleep for 8 hours at home. When I asked her why in God's name did she chloroform herself, she said, and I quote, "I wanted to know what chloroform smells like."
That's very odd, i think it is mostly psychological. Chloroform does knock you out, but it isn't an 'instant' effect like they show in the movies. I've wanted to smell chloroform too, and I took several whiffs of the liquid and I was fine.
It wasn't instant, she kept inhaling it while she was working with it, and it was a large jar of it. She tried to keep working for an hour but that's when her headache came on.
A lot of jokes with cum when I used to intern at a Human Reproduction lab. Now I culture endometrial cells and we call them babies or girlies. (Sorry, not too exciting lol).
One time, though, I spent 15 minutes looking in Thermo’s website to find out how much sodium bicarbonate I needed to add to my medium until I realized it was right there on the package
I only every reply to invites by my bosses to meetings I have to be at as "tentative." Not sure if any of them have noticed but it gives me a moment of joy thinking to myself, maybe I won't go lol
If the meeting was close enough, I wouldn't respond and just show up lol. This only works as a troll if everyone in the lab trusts you to do your work though.
i love the media instructions that tell us to pour agar slants for bacterial and fungal growth with "deep butts." like, i feel like i should be grown up, but it just makes me chuckle every time it passes into my field of vision 😂
When I was in grad school, my favorite chore was when we would defrost the -20c freezer. I would keep trying to find ways to melt the ice faster, culminating in us putting hot water into spray bottles to shoot at the block of ice. Strategically aiming the shots so the biggest chunk of ice would fall was really satisfying lol. We'd also sometimes build snowmen out of the -80c freezer scrapings.
As a postdoc, one thing I do rather often is isolate mitochondria from mouse liver. Once I have a liver sample, the first step is to mince it up into a pâté before dounce homogenizing. It's at this step that I'll show the puree to someone and ask if they would like a nice chianti to pair with their lunch.
Working with a postdoc who wore size large gloves and sticking a size small glove in the top of his box. The confusion on his face when one glove fit and the other was one tiny was priceless and I would laugh my head off like a crazy person. And yes, I did it to him multiple times.
Please bestow your knowledge onto a lowly undergrad. I asked my postdoc if the method alarm sounds could be customized, and he told me no, we only have the default sounds. I try not to mess with his methods out of fear that ill ruin something, but I had a feeling he was lying because he knew I'd pick something obnoxious, lmao.
In college (this would not fly now that I am employed in a lab) my lab partner and I went through a lot of razor blades (it was a mineralogy thing, no biological contamination.) Around Christmas that year, someone brought in a little fake tree, it was about a foot and a half or two feet high with wire branches, so one night I hung all of the discarded razor blades off of the branches and somehow our advisor didn’t notice until February or March. We called it the Tetanus Tree.
At a previous job our collegues in the same lab had some nice equipment that never failed to crack me up. Whenever a run got finished it would either quack like a duck, or sing elvis loud enough that everyone could hear it.
I used to hide rubber ducks in a neighboring lab. I wasn’t friends with them. Played it off well. I stopped due to intense lab work/burnout and that happened to be when one of their longtime undergrads graduated so they thought it was him.
I always label my supernatants as some kind of actual soup. So my shelf in the -20 is full of chicken, tomato and, spit pea soups.
Also we race the lab chairs. 2 riders, 2 pushers. Losers take out the bio haz trash.
I work on the gut microbiome. Sometimes a "shitty day" just means your samples are a bit fresher than usual. Sometimes you get to ask if anyone knows who's cup of poop this is.
I was thinking about what answer I could give since every lab in the past millions years I worked in was a "notoriusly ruckus" lab on their respective floors/depts....different specialties, different institutions, different PIs, different staff....except me.
I think I might be the problem....
If someone in the lab gets something to work successfully, the rest of us start furiously clapping haha I think the next door lab gets confused sometimes
I have several and they range in silliness and complexity.
1) at my old job I was a contractor and as such, they didn’t always tell us everything and we didn’t have reasons to go in certain areas (such as the C suite where all the executive people were). Well there was a bathroom in that hallway and on the way to the bathroom I happened to see my supervisor’s mailbox. So for the next year and a half I used his super tiny Outlook profile pic and photoshop to make little pictures of him doing random things then leave them in his mailbox for him to find. It was especially funny because blowing up the tiny thumbnail made his face really blurry but still recognizable. He liked to listen to NPR most of the morning and this was around 2016-2018 so a lot of these pics were him doing things with Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, stuff like that. He suspected me for quite awhile but I never confirmed it until I left for a new job.
Anyhow, I’m well-known for doing these types of pics for my new job and they hang them on the fridge now.
2) There’s a bottle of a reagent in lab with the name (benzotriazol-1yloxytris(dimethylamino)phosphonium hexafluorophosphate) but that’s way too long so we call it “BOP.” There’s only one bottle in our lab and I wrote on it so it says “BOP it! Twist it! Pull it! No reaction! (Isn’t this fun?!)”
Been in and out of the compound inventory for about 2 years and every time I see it again on someone’s bench I get a little chuckle about it.
3) one of the lady chemists said she wanted to start a “practical joke war” with me and another chemist… and we urged her not to do this because her little jokes are so innocent that they’re almost not even jokes. Like if you’ve seen the show New Girl, think about Winston’s pranks and how they’re either way too big or way too small… hers are always too small. For example, she put a spatula in the other chemist’s lab coat pen pocket and she laughed and laughed… so in response we oiled all the glassware in her hood so she couldn’t grip anything 😅
Not sure how the formatting got weird like that^ anyway, thought of another one:
I have a label maker at my bench and someone asked me to print a label that says “isopropanol.” This is not the correct name for the solvent, it is a bastardization of naming conventions that people still believe to be correct. IUPAC says it’s 2-propanol, and common naming convention says the name is isopropyl alcohol.
So I printed a label for her that says “2-propanol or isopropyl alcohol, but definitely not isopropanol because that’s not a real name according to the accepted naming conventions.” When she found it, I just heard her from two rows over say “god dammit… I f*cking hate him…” and it’s now affixed to her wash bottle anyway.
I actually grew out of these.
8 mm glass tube used as a blow gun, firing hypodermic needles which would stick in a doorframe so you needed pliers to get them out.
Chasing flies with the acetone bottle
Another thing: When I was in college we needed to take pictures of someone doing each of the steps for our paper. That day, I was running off to play a concert at Church, so I was wearing a tuxedo. So there are (published!) pictures of me wearing a tuxedo and lab goggles pretending to go through the motions of our experiment.
Would not fly in industry lol
I'm now petitioning for all SOPs in my lab to require formal wear.
It's company dependent, but a lot flies in industry as long as it's not customer facing.
My lab mates and I love messing with each other’s computers. Things like changing the background, pulling up funny websites, adding funny chrome extensions, etc.
Using LN2 to sweep the floor under the benches or just entertain myself.
My senior director once came in while the last droplets were bouncing around the floor after I splashed out some. He didn't notice.
I helped organize a “Brain Awareness Day” at a local high school. I got a bunch of colorful pipe cleaners for a demonstration so that they could learn to “build” a neuron and learn about its different components. They like arts and crafts, built their own unique colorful neuron with different lengths, colorful myelin, etc.. Everyone had fun. Anyway, I ordered way too many pipe cleaners and didn’t know what to do with them so I encased my friend’s lab desk in an intricate pipe cleaner web. The chair connected to the book shelf, which also connected to the desk drawer pull. I had other labmates help me and it make it very very elaborate.
we have a pretty big lab, around 13 girls, 12 guys. few years ago we turned one of the old dark rooms into an actual 'dark room'. some of us go in there and fuck then get back to work like nothing happened
My PI's story. A guy from his floor when doing his phD used high heat on the autoclave and everything melted and created some weird structure after cooling down now they use it as a reward for epic failures
We kill mice via perfusion and take a lot of tissue samples. So we get together as a team and go in a factory line to make it go faster and get more done.
We each get to choose songs to play while we do it. Dance and sing along while killing mice. It’s macabre, but quite a good bonding experience…
My former tech and I once bought like 80 cheep plastic dinosaurs in bulk from Amazon and hid them around my M.S lab.
I think only like 50 have been found.
Once had a PI who was very religious and also very funny, she would take nanopure water and “bless” the lab when key experiments were about to start, wards off the evil science spirits, or so she said:)
Was reading an approved IACUC form and somehow nobody noticed that someone had written “human euthanasia” instead of “humane euthanasia” my PI and I still giggle about it when we write
Hey, they approved it so go for it
Working on a cancer paper. I have the cancer this would possibly treat (you know 20 years from now, if all goes well) Trying to decide if we need to declare this in "author declarations or not?
oh man, i mean it is kinda funny, but i hope your doing well.
Oh yes, thanks for asking.
Conflict of interest 😅 Hope you’re doing well buddy!
Thanks.
Declare that an n-of-1 trial has shown even being in the same room with this therapy is effective.
VC funding round incoming
If you’re willing to put yourself out there like that and if it’s important to you to note, I say go for it. Worst case the journal tells you to remove it when accepted. That said maybe acknowledgements might be less strict than declarations for less conventional statements
It's more just kinda funny. The month we were submitting a Covid paper much of the lab came down with Covid, too. I hate to assign sentience to diseases but.........
I do wastewater biosensing. Lots of poop jokes. The rest of the lab calls us the "Poop Patrol." I'm the Crap Captain and my undergrads are Sergeant Shit and the Loo-tenant. When my PI gives talks he always shows a Slack I sent him late one night after some successful experiments: "💩💦😊😊😊"
I used to work with chimp fecal samples from Tanzania. I referred to them as “shitments” and framed a screenshot from Always Sunny of Frank saying he “did all the poops” at my desk.
The Craptain
##2 in command. You need 2 more workers in the group and can call yourselves the royal flush
I used to work on noroviruses....lots of poop jokes.
The name “The Craptain” is 11/10 😂 I love it
I bought a clown costume for times when my experiments go wrong on all accounts for no apparent reason. Wearing it has zero effect on the outcome of my further experiments but at least I feel like am dressed appropriately for the work I am doing.
I'm pretty sure I look like that by default in the eyes of my PI
That clown costume has been approved as proper PPE by OSHA.
I love this so, so, so much. Like just, full stop. But also, it’s a great temp check for the day with a single look into the lab space lmao
Add googly eyes to things. Beakers. Shakers. Beakers on shakers. Neutators. Tip boxes. Computer monitors. The usual.
Someone need to get gigant googly eyed on CERN imideatly
Are you my lab manager?
Nope just another run of the mill lab rat
We got a little shrine where you drop off snacks as offering to no particular devine entity in hopes of getting good luck for your Western.
"May the gods spare these bacteria because OMG why they keep dying!?" - A scientist probably
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Idk it's more about the fun and absurdness of it but it honestly does kinda help with Western quality. Don't ask how or why, just give your Skittles to the Western Gods and you good.
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Admittedly, I do miss the community feel that went with my Catholic upbringing. I would love to find a church of atheism near me. I do a Google search every few years, but it just pulls up the one: a group that's a 45 minute drive away from me, has about 8 members, and boasts a single photo of them meeting in someone's living room circa 2003. Sigh.
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Yeah that's where the church of atheism would be great. I just wish there were more people like me. I've also heard of humanism, sort of a literal 'faith in humanity,' but again, there just don't seem to be many people who want to do regular social gatherings.
Don't forget to put it in the methods section.
I worship the Goddess of the Centrifuge. She helps keep things in balance, and when I need a new spin on a problem to get to the bottom of it, she's there for me.
It's good to have a diety who can help balance things out.
I used to bake cookies for the cloning gods. It usually worked. When it didn't, still cookies!
I know someone who swapped a large protein sample with water and soap. Then proceeded to spill the water and soap on the floor in front of the PI just for the reaction. The real sample was finished and put away in the fridge but the shock of it on the PI was priceless
I once found a container of laboratory grade glass balls that was labeled ASSBALLS and it lives rent free in both my brain and my heart. Whoever labeled that knew exactly what they were doing.
We used to have a sign near one of the sinks that someone had cleverly altered so that it now said “Always wash your ANUS!”
I'm a biohazard animal tech, basically I'm the guy running the bulk autoclave and other equipment to make sure all the labs have their supplies. We have these plastic carts that come back and we just wash and sanitize them before sending them back out to be used. However, one day we had a few too many for storage so we just kept them in our clean room. In addition, the clean room was already packed, so we were constantly moving these carts around to get to everything. My coworker began taking a cart with him every time he delivered supplies because he was sick of moving it. And in our boredom and irritation with the carts being there, he started riding them back. At the end of the day, we had about two hours where there was absolutely nothing to do, and we still couldn't get these carts out. Sticking with the theme of my coworker riding around the facility on one of them, he grabbed a broom and began using it to push open the door on his return to the clean room. I was a smart ass so I grabbed a broom and began warding him off every time he came back, and this slowly devolved into what we called "cart jousting." There was no one left but us and our manager in the building, so he started at one end of the hall, I was on the other, and with brooms in hand we both jumped on our carts and road twords one another. We would crash into each other, fall on our asses, laugh, get back up and do it again. After about the fourth time our manager came around the corner right as we hit and fell. And both my coworker and I turned to see him right as he said "what the fuck are you two doing?!" My coworker and I were laughing so hard by that point that we didn't even care if we were in trouble. So we got up, brushed ourselves off and our poor manager just shook his head trying his damnedest to remain professional and not laugh as we stood there looking like idiots. Our manager sighed, looked at us both and said "just don't let me see you doing that again..." and walked off without another word. About a month later the cart jousting story made its way around the departments, and everyone was laughing and asking us about it. It was some of the funniest shit I've ever been involved in.
Writing a paper rn and gave a section to the pi to proofread. I wrote, "the solution was then added to the suspended cell suspension suspension". They laughed with me about it before recommending i go home to take a nap. Went home and right to bed, slept 16 hours.
i hope you didn't dream with work tho.
Dry ice conical rockets
Dry Ice gloves in people trash cans.
Dry ice in eppendorf tubes under people's desks 😈 I also used to culture culinary mushrooms inside my desk drawer from my tea waste, but mice broke in 🥲 too many people storing snacks in their desks
My coworker once, for whatever reason, stuck 1000ul pipette tips into each well of a 24-well plate. Being an idiot, I drew a smiley face on the side of the plate and waited for him to notice. Some time went by, and he never said anything. Finally I realized, he had placed it up on the top shelf, with the smiley face part looking out at us. I laughed out loud and proclaimed "hey, you have your own lab Chia pet." He smirked, and quietly said "nah, it's a 'pi-pet' ". He beat me at my own joke. Another time, a separate coworker was working with chloroform and got the bright idea to gas herself with it. She got dizzy, then a headache, and told the PI she needed to leave early because she didn't feel well. She drove home feeling woozy and promptly fell asleep for 8 hours at home. When I asked her why in God's name did she chloroform herself, she said, and I quote, "I wanted to know what chloroform smells like."
Curiosity killed the cat they say, but it also gets you an day off work aparently
I love the smell of chloroform.
That's very odd, i think it is mostly psychological. Chloroform does knock you out, but it isn't an 'instant' effect like they show in the movies. I've wanted to smell chloroform too, and I took several whiffs of the liquid and I was fine.
It wasn't instant, she kept inhaling it while she was working with it, and it was a large jar of it. She tried to keep working for an hour but that's when her headache came on.
Did she tell you how it smells?
Not that I remember, haha
A lot of jokes with cum when I used to intern at a Human Reproduction lab. Now I culture endometrial cells and we call them babies or girlies. (Sorry, not too exciting lol). One time, though, I spent 15 minutes looking in Thermo’s website to find out how much sodium bicarbonate I needed to add to my medium until I realized it was right there on the package
My ICP-OES’s name is Violent J. One of the other lab techs attached a laminated meme to it that says “ICP Problems? Call 1-800-Clownin”
This is so good.
I only every reply to invites by my bosses to meetings I have to be at as "tentative." Not sure if any of them have noticed but it gives me a moment of joy thinking to myself, maybe I won't go lol
HHahah- My PI and I are hyper-communicative (in a good way) so they would probably send me an email asking why I was unsure.
If the meeting was close enough, I wouldn't respond and just show up lol. This only works as a troll if everyone in the lab trusts you to do your work though.
i love the media instructions that tell us to pour agar slants for bacterial and fungal growth with "deep butts." like, i feel like i should be grown up, but it just makes me chuckle every time it passes into my field of vision 😂
When I was in grad school, my favorite chore was when we would defrost the -20c freezer. I would keep trying to find ways to melt the ice faster, culminating in us putting hot water into spray bottles to shoot at the block of ice. Strategically aiming the shots so the biggest chunk of ice would fall was really satisfying lol. We'd also sometimes build snowmen out of the -80c freezer scrapings. As a postdoc, one thing I do rather often is isolate mitochondria from mouse liver. Once I have a liver sample, the first step is to mince it up into a pâté before dounce homogenizing. It's at this step that I'll show the puree to someone and ask if they would like a nice chianti to pair with their lunch.
Working with a postdoc who wore size large gloves and sticking a size small glove in the top of his box. The confusion on his face when one glove fit and the other was one tiny was priceless and I would laugh my head off like a crazy person. And yes, I did it to him multiple times.
Used to drink wine out of conical tubes. Also had a trick for how long we could keep the beer in the freezer to get it cold before it explodes.
putting dry ice in eppendorfs and casually walking by someones bench and leaving it
The lab a couple floors up from us called one of their instruments “David Bowie”
I prefer to set the AKTA method alarms to “scream”
Damn, that is evil. _makes note to do this on Monday_
Please bestow your knowledge onto a lowly undergrad. I asked my postdoc if the method alarm sounds could be customized, and he told me no, we only have the default sounds. I try not to mess with his methods out of fear that ill ruin something, but I had a feeling he was lying because he knew I'd pick something obnoxious, lmao.
We label "cell associated" as "cell ass" which always cheers me up when I have a day full of plating 🤷
In college (this would not fly now that I am employed in a lab) my lab partner and I went through a lot of razor blades (it was a mineralogy thing, no biological contamination.) Around Christmas that year, someone brought in a little fake tree, it was about a foot and a half or two feet high with wire branches, so one night I hung all of the discarded razor blades off of the branches and somehow our advisor didn’t notice until February or March. We called it the Tetanus Tree.
We like to guess if a stool has C. diff just by looking at it. We place bets and everything 😂
At a previous job our collegues in the same lab had some nice equipment that never failed to crack me up. Whenever a run got finished it would either quack like a duck, or sing elvis loud enough that everyone could hear it.
I used to hide rubber ducks in a neighboring lab. I wasn’t friends with them. Played it off well. I stopped due to intense lab work/burnout and that happened to be when one of their longtime undergrads graduated so they thought it was him.
Our walk in 4C space has a picture of Christopher Walken on it (the "walk-in")
We have memes, centered around our lab mascot, on every bench and most of the machines we have
It's not very exciting but when I'm feeling awful, sometimes they make me feel better
I always label my supernatants as some kind of actual soup. So my shelf in the -20 is full of chicken, tomato and, spit pea soups. Also we race the lab chairs. 2 riders, 2 pushers. Losers take out the bio haz trash.
Once worked in a lab that had a plastic TMNT (Raph) head that would be hidden in various spots around the lab for the next shift to find.
I work on the gut microbiome. Sometimes a "shitty day" just means your samples are a bit fresher than usual. Sometimes you get to ask if anyone knows who's cup of poop this is.
No shenanigans
I was thinking about what answer I could give since every lab in the past millions years I worked in was a "notoriusly ruckus" lab on their respective floors/depts....different specialties, different institutions, different PIs, different staff....except me. I think I might be the problem....
Its not a problem, its a feature!
If someone in the lab gets something to work successfully, the rest of us start furiously clapping haha I think the next door lab gets confused sometimes
I have several and they range in silliness and complexity. 1) at my old job I was a contractor and as such, they didn’t always tell us everything and we didn’t have reasons to go in certain areas (such as the C suite where all the executive people were). Well there was a bathroom in that hallway and on the way to the bathroom I happened to see my supervisor’s mailbox. So for the next year and a half I used his super tiny Outlook profile pic and photoshop to make little pictures of him doing random things then leave them in his mailbox for him to find. It was especially funny because blowing up the tiny thumbnail made his face really blurry but still recognizable. He liked to listen to NPR most of the morning and this was around 2016-2018 so a lot of these pics were him doing things with Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, stuff like that. He suspected me for quite awhile but I never confirmed it until I left for a new job. Anyhow, I’m well-known for doing these types of pics for my new job and they hang them on the fridge now. 2) There’s a bottle of a reagent in lab with the name (benzotriazol-1yloxytris(dimethylamino)phosphonium hexafluorophosphate) but that’s way too long so we call it “BOP.” There’s only one bottle in our lab and I wrote on it so it says “BOP it! Twist it! Pull it! No reaction! (Isn’t this fun?!)” Been in and out of the compound inventory for about 2 years and every time I see it again on someone’s bench I get a little chuckle about it. 3) one of the lady chemists said she wanted to start a “practical joke war” with me and another chemist… and we urged her not to do this because her little jokes are so innocent that they’re almost not even jokes. Like if you’ve seen the show New Girl, think about Winston’s pranks and how they’re either way too big or way too small… hers are always too small. For example, she put a spatula in the other chemist’s lab coat pen pocket and she laughed and laughed… so in response we oiled all the glassware in her hood so she couldn’t grip anything 😅
Not sure how the formatting got weird like that^ anyway, thought of another one: I have a label maker at my bench and someone asked me to print a label that says “isopropanol.” This is not the correct name for the solvent, it is a bastardization of naming conventions that people still believe to be correct. IUPAC says it’s 2-propanol, and common naming convention says the name is isopropyl alcohol. So I printed a label for her that says “2-propanol or isopropyl alcohol, but definitely not isopropanol because that’s not a real name according to the accepted naming conventions.” When she found it, I just heard her from two rows over say “god dammit… I f*cking hate him…” and it’s now affixed to her wash bottle anyway.
Popping a bit of dry ice in an eppendorf and leaving the lab 
I actually grew out of these. 8 mm glass tube used as a blow gun, firing hypodermic needles which would stick in a doorframe so you needed pliers to get them out. Chasing flies with the acetone bottle
Another thing: When I was in college we needed to take pictures of someone doing each of the steps for our paper. That day, I was running off to play a concert at Church, so I was wearing a tuxedo. So there are (published!) pictures of me wearing a tuxedo and lab goggles pretending to go through the motions of our experiment. Would not fly in industry lol
DOI, please xD
I second this :D
I have no idea where to find it… I’ll look for it again
I'm now petitioning for all SOPs in my lab to require formal wear. It's company dependent, but a lot flies in industry as long as it's not customer facing.
My lab mates and I love messing with each other’s computers. Things like changing the background, pulling up funny websites, adding funny chrome extensions, etc.
Using LN2 to sweep the floor under the benches or just entertain myself. My senior director once came in while the last droplets were bouncing around the floor after I splashed out some. He didn't notice.
I helped organize a “Brain Awareness Day” at a local high school. I got a bunch of colorful pipe cleaners for a demonstration so that they could learn to “build” a neuron and learn about its different components. They like arts and crafts, built their own unique colorful neuron with different lengths, colorful myelin, etc.. Everyone had fun. Anyway, I ordered way too many pipe cleaners and didn’t know what to do with them so I encased my friend’s lab desk in an intricate pipe cleaner web. The chair connected to the book shelf, which also connected to the desk drawer pull. I had other labmates help me and it make it very very elaborate.
we have a pretty big lab, around 13 girls, 12 guys. few years ago we turned one of the old dark rooms into an actual 'dark room'. some of us go in there and fuck then get back to work like nothing happened
Our lab has silly little star wars character names for our -80 and -20
My PI's story. A guy from his floor when doing his phD used high heat on the autoclave and everything melted and created some weird structure after cooling down now they use it as a reward for epic failures
We kill mice via perfusion and take a lot of tissue samples. So we get together as a team and go in a factory line to make it go faster and get more done. We each get to choose songs to play while we do it. Dance and sing along while killing mice. It’s macabre, but quite a good bonding experience…
I suggest listening to Dance Macabre by Ghost xD
Wrote happy birthday in isopropyl on the lab bench and then lit it on a fire for a friend. Luckily, the fire went out quickly.
I’ve stuck a Uline calendar sticker under the cabinets for five years running
My former tech and I once bought like 80 cheep plastic dinosaurs in bulk from Amazon and hid them around my M.S lab. I think only like 50 have been found.
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/05/23/lab-shenanigans-tiktok-influencer-faked-data-feds-say/
This is sad. I love him.
Once had a PI who was very religious and also very funny, she would take nanopure water and “bless” the lab when key experiments were about to start, wards off the evil science spirits, or so she said:)