Must remember to put a category tag somewhere so y'all can see how this also belongs under "rants" like the previous entry does.

So I had to do half an elisa today. First we had to wait for the antibody to come in, since the one provided in the kit had leaked and there wasn't even enough for half the plate. Then I had to wait until someone came back so he could give me the last two samples that I needed to run. So I didn't get started until around noon, which usually doesn't matter since the kit only takes about three hours to run. Mostly the actual running went fine, though I nearly forgot to save the extra solution for the time when we run the rest of the plate and I made up all the freaking washing buffer but it's alright cause it stores for a month. But then we get to the end and someone comes in from another lab and asks to use the plate reader. I say sure cause it doesn't matter, as long as I can use it in about 10 minutes I'll be fine. But I guess it messed me up, cause when those 10 (really 7 but who's counting?) minutes were up, I totally forgot to do the last step of the protocol and went straight to the plate reader. I've been doing elisas for the last week and a half straight, not to mention the other fifty or so that I've done in the past, and I've never done that before. So I get to the reader, read the plate, and wonder why the hell the answers are so wrong. So I realize the plate is blue and not yellow like it should be and therein lies the 'oh shit' moment.
I don't really know if the extra few minutes the plate had without the last step really affected it, or the results were just going to be bad anyway because of something else I did. Regardless, it didn't look any better once I went back and did that last step, in fact it almost looked worse. It was the second time running a few of these samples and most of them have been thawed until kingdom come already, so I'm sure they're losing somewhat of their usefulness. But still. The standard curve was all shot to hell before I messed it up, I think. So in this case it's good that we still have half a plate. We would have used it for something else because elisa kits aren't cheap, but we'll just have to get another one, which hurts. Some of them run upwards of $500. Argh. Thank goodness it doesn't come out of my paycheck. And Luigi was really sporting about it. Thanks to the italian. I feel awful that he can't get his results because I screwed up.
This is sort of going to ruin my weekend because now I'll ruminate on it all the weekend and wonder what I did wrong and pray to God that I get it right on Tuesday (thank GOD there's a paid holiday on monday!) because I don't think he'll be so sporting a third time. It doesn't feel like the weekend anymore.

But Part Seventeen of the Shoebox Project makes it all worth it. And I need to remember to head to the library tomorrow so I can pick up the next Elizabeth Haydon book, .