During Labor Day weekend (for those of you non-Americans, that would be the first Monday in September), the building in which I work (and often, it feels like, live) does major maintenance. They shut off all of the ventilation to do arcane things to the massive and convoluted air conditioning/etc. system, deal with major infrastructure issues, etc. On Labor Day itself, they even go further - shut off ventilation lines to all of the various hoods in the building (tissue culture hoods, chemical fume hoods, etc.), and do yearly maintenance.
Unfortunately, many of the researchers in the building either cannot or will not cease their experiments for a complete three days (sadly, the building is rather lively at all times of the day, every day). As such, when I dropped into work today to feed my cells, I noticed that Tech was (a) sweltering hot, and (b) full of sweating scientists and workmen. This normally wouldn't be so bad - OK, so maybe it's 90+ degrees (Farenheit, around 34 or 35 centigrade) inside the building, and humid to boot, but one can still safely carry out research.
Unfortunately, I've been told that a great number of these researchers also come in on Labor Day itself. Now, that just can't be safe - performing experiments while all forms of safety ventilation are shut off (particularly if one is working with radioactive/biohazardous/volative chemical materials). Not only that, but all of the hoods in the building have alarms for when ventilation is low; the researchers must be driven slowly insane by the noise.
There's just no way in hell that this fits government safety regulations. But, I suppose... some rather dubious means are acceptable for advancing science, neh?
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1 comment:
at least in my lab
... we do get labor day off, excepting the 4 to 6 hour long shifts we each take baby sitting the instruments in Tech to make sure that they're okay during the various shutdowns.
So we're in, and usually since we're in for that chunck of time, we do other things experiements other work, etc.. but look, science is dangerous..
I work in a field where people used to taste their experiemnts and write down the results in their lab notebooks... as a part of the "description" part.. mind you one fellow still attempts that...
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