Sterile, shmerile

Today we were in Prokaryotes lab, spreading bacteria on agar plates. These agar plates, they're finicky bastards: we'd prepared 10 of them, but four got contaminated with fungus and another two didn't congeal properly (instead of beng firm and springy, they just sort of flopped around in a jell-oey mess and looked sorry for themselves). Team 1, bunch of ninnies**, had no contaminated plates. Teams 2 and 4 had six and seven usable plates each, respectively.

So we were being totally careful with our measly four surviving agar plates. We had our aseptic technique down pat. Two Bunsen burners at full throttle, latex gloves, surgical masks, dipping our plate spreaders in alcohol and then flaming them (very fun), keeping the lids close to the agar plates, making sure the micropipette tips minded their own business and didn't touch the table or anything...

This is a micropipette, by the way.

&%$*!! Someone pressed the wrong button on the micropipette and dropped its tip in the poop solution. Everyone spoke at the same time:

"Fish it out!"

"Here, if you use the agitator...!"

"Oh, crap!"

"Don't put anything in it, we can't contaminate it!!"

"Ah. Fish it out with a pencil or something."

We all stopped and stared at Oscar, who said the last bit. Then we all cracked up and kept snorting sporadically for about an hour. Also he and another teammate labelled the MacConkey agar "MacDonkey", which was funny until the teacher picked it up and went, completely seriously, "Oh, yeah, MacDonkey agar, whose is this?". Then it was hilarious.

Well, perhaps you had to be there.

There's this awesome machine that you use to shake up a solution before pipetting it onto a plate, so that you get a uniform distribution of bacteria and not the three that were floating on top while the rest partied it down with the sediment. Seen here is a vortex mixer, mixing up poopy solution number one, which is one part poop, nine parts saline solution, twenty parts stinky. Also you can see I wasn't lying about the gloves and surgical masks.

** They're not ninnies, I just wanted to use that word. Sa-tis-faction.