People vs life

Labs have to deal with sales reps. They come around with their flyers for lab supplies, for anything from pipette tips to mini-centrifuges. They often leave us with pieces of candy (or else advertise that there'll be a vendor show on campus with food, please come), or occasionally a pen or post-its (everyone likes post-its; if you work in a lab, post-its are you friends). Today, for some unknown reason, the rep, after talking to our lab tech, left us with a flyer and a packet of sunflower seeds. As in the type you find in a nursery, not the type you find in a grocery store. It is also of the mammoth variety, not dwarf.

My labmates and I are equal parts bemused and amused. What are we supposed to do with the seeds? Grow giant sunflowers in the middle of the lab, between the incubator and the spec? I mean in some lab some people can have a small potted plant at their desk (clean area, never on the bench with the chemicals). Very tasteful. Gives a nice ambiance. Mammoth sunflower does not equal small potted plant. Mammoth sunflowers, as the name implies, are huge. (Well, for something that's not a bush or tree.) Give them right amount of sunlight and water they average over seven feet tall. Why on earth were we given a packet of these seeds?

I continue to be confused by marketing people.

Dorothy's taking home the seeds to give to her son. Maybe he can do a science project out of it or something.

Something else strange happened today as well, with my bottle of water that I tried to autoclave. I needed to treat the water with DEPC (...uh diethylpyrocarbonate) to get rid of the RNase in it, since RNase chews up RNA and I need the RNA of my samples intact, not chewed up. Usually you put DEPC in the water (where it forms clear little beads that roll around in the bottom of the bottle -- pretty cool to look at) and let it sit overnight, and then the next morning the beads would have magically disappeared. Then you autoclave it to inactivate the DEPC so it doesn't interfere with the enzymes you might need to put in the water later. Since the DEPC beads are always gone by the morning, I usually don't check for the beads. Yet somehow, today after I took my two liter bottle of water out of the autoclave, I noticed that there's a small bead of DEPC rolling around on the bottom. I stared at it. Wendy stared at it. Eventually most of the lab (except for the PI) came to stare at it. We have no idea how this was possible, especially given the thing's been autoclaved and usually that much heat and pressure can be used to help things go into solution. I've left it to cool overnight and I'll try to autoclave it again but really, what? (I should mention I had three other bottles of DEPC-treated water and this did not happen with those bottles and so, before you ask, I used the same DEPC for all of them so it is neither the DEPC nor the autoclave.)

People confuse me. Life confuses me. It's been a confusing sort of day.