A series of unfortunate events

I had a bad Good Friday.

First, I had to wake up in the morning to go to lab on a PUBLIC HOLIDAY.

Second, on my way to school, while crossing the pedestrian bridge, a moustache-ed, Middle-East-looking man heading the same direction walked up to my side and then pointed at my 1L- water container and insulted me. It goes like this:

Moustache Jerk : (snicker) What is that?
Me : (blur, thought he was pointing at my shoes) ...........
Moustache Jerk : (points at my semi-filled water bottle)
Me : .... Water? (thinking: duhhh)
Moustache Jerk : Why carry water?
Me : .... Because I want to drink? (thinking: duhhh)
Moustache Jerk : There's plenty in campus. You don't have to carry such a heavy container! (laughs)
Me : (drops sarcastic bomb) Because I like it?
Moustache Jerk : (laughs some more) Enjoy it then!

It took all my (already draining) willpower to not throw my 'heavy' water container at his moustache-d face. What kind of greeting is this that you give to a stranger on the way to work? It was such an insult! I could have carried a GALLON of water if I wanted to, what right does he had to make fun of that? How rude!

Third, every single food outlet within proximity from my lab is closed because it's a public holiday. *Pause*
Do people not need to eat on a public holiday????? The only fast-food outlet in campus, the source of gastronomic salvation for all us round-the-clock lab-ers, is also closed on Good Friday!! In the end I didn't eat breakfast, lunch nor dinner the entire day. I already skipped dinner last night, so unwarranted fasting did not go well with my gastrointestinal system. If this were a game of SIMS, my mood metre would be glowing red.

Fourth, the freezer screwed my morale big time. Already I was cold (the stupid air-conditioning is forever blowing at 0 degrees), hungry, tired, and very very mentally drained after such a long day, so all I want was to go home earlier to catch some sleep. Yesterday I discovered that I have 68 vials of bacterial cells inside the -80 degrees Celsius freezer not labeled according to the lab's system, so I had to make the changes today. So what I did was remove the 68 vials in batches of 10 serially to change the labels (you can't leave the vials out in room temperature too long, the bacteria die in an instant). Little did I know that repeated opening and closing of the freezer door will cause the interior temperature to rise VERY QUICKLY. When I was done, the display outside the freezer door showed that the interior temperature is -69 degrees Celsius, and the freezer started beeping like mad. The alarm for 'high temperature' kept flashing and beeping, and it truly ALARM-ed me. I stood there staring at the freezer door, dumbfounded.... and to my horror, the temperature kept increasing. The next thing I know, it was already -64 degrees Celsius. My blood froze.

Panic clutched its claws around my neck as I ran back to lab to call my colleague. If the temperature do not decrease now, ALL the cells in the freezer will die and.... I dare not think of the consequences. In consolation, my colleague relayed that the freezer will take some time to start cooling down, so I had to wait for a few HOURS for the freezer to cool back to -80. For the following 2-3hours, I ran back and forth between the lab and the freezer in the chiller room to silence the beeping alarm and check the temperature. Fortunately, after 1 hour, the temperature slowly dropped. It was an agonizing wait, because I had to allow the temperature to stabilize before opening the door again to put in 80 more vials. For the whole night, I had to wait for the bloody freezer to stabilize. The lethargy, hunger and stupid air-conditioning really rocked my spirits.

It's such a BAD Friday.

～みはる～