Gather Your Science Nuts for the Long Winter Ahead, Children.

I am sitting in my lab, waiting for some oil to heat up.  The oil is for science, not for pouring over the battlements while longbowmen whizz shafts past my head.  That whole sentence is two or three adjectives away from some kinky sex, or possibly a scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail.  Coconut.

Technically, it's not my lab, it belongs to the University.  The oil is mine, though.  I called dibs.  You have to call dibs in this lab, or all of the science gear disappears into cupboards, never to be seen again.  Finding things is the primary impediment to my work.  It would be less of an impediment if there was some enforced system of organization, in place of Gather Your Science Nuts for the Long Winter Ahead, Children.

It took me three hours to find the parts I needed to assemble a Soxhlet extraction column, this morning.  Three.  Hours.  That's a round bottom flask, the Soxhlet apparatus, a condensing column, a heater, a stand, two clamps, some boiling chips, ten grams of my sample, and some hexane.  That would have taken twenty minutes, tops, in any other lab where like equipment goes with like equipment in drawers and cupboards labelled things like, "stoppers," and "beakers." Oooh.   Aaaah.  Mysterious.  Exotic.

I've been trying to put my finger on why this keeps happening, exactly.  Even I am forced to stash my tools when no one is looking so that I know they'll be there later.  From what I have observed, there are three primary factors:

1 - Language. 
I work with a collection of people for whom English is a second language, at best.  In some cases I would be willing to put money on English being a third or fourth language, which is actually quite impressive.  Because English is often the only common language, this contributes to caches of science stored in secret for the revolution. You have a group of very intelligent people that often cannot communicate effectively with each other.

2 - Time.
Many of the graduate students and post-doctoral candidates that come here are come only a few months.  They cram a cupboard full of samples and glassware, and then disappear across an ocean without cleaning out their hoard.  As a consequence, there are forgotten trinkets and discarded (potentially hazardous) samples in every occupiable storage space.

3 - Culture.
 For many of these students, science is a competition.  They are fighting for the credibility and funding that comes with being published.  They are fighting for their future careers, and to do that, they have to publish first.  At least before the other people who might be duplicating their work, or making it obsolete or irrelevant.

I wonder how many labs are like this.  Le sigh.  Ah well, I still love my job.