Coming into a new laboratory is a very scary experience. Especially when you want to clean up and organize everything and you have a german lady as a lab technician that is about 6' 1'' feet tall! I found out that she was not very fond of my cleaning habits since she asked me "You are not one of those neat freaks are you?" But after seeing what I had done with the place, I think she actually liked it. Now I know where everything is and this place is now starting to feel more like home.
Also, I was given a set of samples by another postdoc in the lab. He wanted me to analyze them by immunoblot in order to test my working abilities... I guess. Along the process everybody kept trying to tell me how to make my buffers, run the gel, treat the membranes and under what conditions I should transfer it, but I was very stubborn and stuck to the way I did my 10,000 previous immunoblots. All of this time I kept thinking, if surgeons are not told by every hospital how to perform a surgery, why should researchers be told how to run their immunoblots! hahaha (Yes, for researchers doing immunoblots and making them look perfect is as much of an art as surgery!) In the end, my immunoblot looked very good and it even got some people asking me under what conditions was the gel ran and transferred. So, I really hope that next time people will look at me as trustworthy and I am allowed to do things the way I know how to do them.
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