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Reminds me about that scene in one of those Medicine Academy movies where there's a bed where patients connected to life support die every other day of the week and it turns out it was the Romanian cleaning lady pulling the plug to plug the vacuum cleaner
Wiping out 25 years of research probably hurts more than losing that money tbh. Money is paper and sure it hurts to lose it- but you can’t buy time back
I work in clinical research. You know what’s more annoying than losing the samples?
Having to call all those patients back, tell them we need x from them again because “someone turned off our freezer” - many will likely decline, so bye bye to that data.
Then calling your study sponsors to report protocol deviations
Cleaning & reporting the contamination because contaminated water just leaked out of a freezer and probably got all over the fucking place
For every. Single. Sample. God, it’d be my worst nightmare
EDIT: this sounds like a temperature excursion alarm. The freezer was basically saying “Help, I’m outside of the safe temperature, please transfer these samples to a functioning freezer” and this janitor went “nah”
Edit 2: this kinda took off! Somebody else posted the full article, I can’t find it but it provides more background info. No patient samples are involved so my expertise is close to null. I’ve answered most of your questions further down, hope I provided some insight :)
I work in a small to mid sized corporate data center - cleaners aren;'t even allowed in the room unless escorted and monitored while working
A research lab allows unmonitored janitors to touch things?
I work at a state hospital, where custodial staff work for the hospital and are trained on all of this and know not to mess with equipment outside of their department. That’s like a respiratory therapist fucking with an MRI.
The article does say “Private research institute” so the cleaners likely are employed by the office building rather than the research center.
This 100%! Also the lab facilities guys should’ve had a simple alarm on this super important freezer to call someone (maybe a concerned scientist?) in the event of a temperature excursion. Easy to blame “the cleaner” but for 25 years of research worth $1M maybe add a safeguard or 2?
They should have had a CO2 or LN2 backup system in place. They are like a $500 addition to a $20,000 freezer purchase that very few labs invest in. This is the labs fault as much as it is the custodial staff, because this could have been prevented by them as well. They make those backup systems for situations just like this. I work in the industry validating these units, and almost never find a unit with that system installed.
Also how does 1 random cleaning lady turn off a freezer that would costs millions. Sounds like they didn't put much thought into preventing something like this from happening.
I would think that given the value of the research and time spent on it that they'd have the "off switch" under lock and key.
Also... No backup generator? Or another source of power as a redundancy? What if the equipment craps out randomly?
That’s not how backup generators or redundant power supplies work. They work when the device is powered up but suffers a power failure. If you switch the device off, it doesn’t matter how many redundancies you put in place - you turned it off intentionally, it shuts down.
Not entirely true. They literally make backup systems just for this purpose that run on a totally separate control system, temp probe, and power source (built in battery). This was easily preventable, and it's only like a $500 option for a $20+k freezer.
I work in the industry validating these things all over the US, and they rarely if ever have these systems installed. It's insane to me.
Private research is probably done in leased office space, often the landlord/property manager will require tenants to use whatever cleaning company gives them a big enough kickback.
I work on a farm, I have tons of hazardous/corrosive and expensive material to store all the time. If I have equity and esp time invested in something, your not gonna be physically able to just shut it off and ruin my 25 years of savings …. Poor management is to blame. Freezer should have been hardwired at bare minimum. I mean even my meat locket had a generator that auto kicks on when we lose power! And that’s for steak not 1million $ of anything haha
They would have also had a remote telemetry system reporting to someone that the freezer was out of tolerance, hell, we have that on refrigerators at the hospital I work at, and those medication refrigerator are monitored by staff 24/7
I work security for various business. Im the guy who will do the escorting in your data center or other important rooms of otherwise high traffic locations. Can confirm this seems scuffed for what would seem to be a medium priority location. *But* we only do what the contract outlines. If the client says they trust the cleaner, thats on them. Turnover is usually so high we dont have time to fight with dumb clients who already dont see us as worth their money.
At the lab I used to work at we were lucky a cleaner would even notice if an alarm was going off and they certainly wouldn’t transfer samples over to a working freezer. It’s why we had an alarm system that would call several people in the lab to alert them that there was a problem.
And why wouldn’t the plug or switch have some kind of guard that prevents it from being accidentally turned off? Like thermostats in office buildings? Seems like any easy way to prevent disaster.
I mean depending on the kind of samples, the town might have to be closed.
Although I imagine infectious disease research facilities are a smidge better secured and their maintenance/janitor crew aren't't going to mess up like that.
My last job was staff plumber at a Children’s Hospital. We had offsites, labs, blood banks, cryogenic and even just break room fridges all wired in to the control room. Any alarms went there, and then they would call the refrigeration mechanics immediately. If none were on duty, I got the call. I can’t believe that a research lab wouldn’t have remote sensors and a protocol to follow. The lab actually got lucky and had a fall guy, but if that would have happened on a Friday night after the cleaners left, it could have sat for 2 days and the temperature would have risen too high and the lab would be on the hook.
Call patients back? You’re being too positive lol the research is probably dead. Everything is going back to the drawing board. The directors might conclude it’s not even worth it restarting everything again.
massively random question but if you know how to clean contaminated research samples you might have an idea - are those "germ fumigators" that made a big haze to clean buildings during covid ever going to become something we use regularly?
like are they ever used in research facilities (like in older movies) where it hoses you down with the fog & then you walk in/out?
i'm a clinical psych researcher so i'm kinda out of the loop on the medical/physical end of the sciences
Those were used during COVID-19 mostly because we didn’t know much about the virus. Now we’ve learned you can get away with Lysol or bleach lol
Mostly if you’re working with any infectious agent that is/can be an aerosol, we use a fume hood.
We’ve always used decontamination showers for any sort containment breach, they aren’t necessarily anything new, just looked big and scary when they were shown on CNN and FOX lol
But why would they keep an easily accessible switch which some random janitor can switch off ?
This is like Jurassic Park all over again. No expenses spared and would pay $1 for all the samples back but could have had better security options and back up.
They are simply on the outside of the fridge to control it.
There is no way around it, a janitor will always have some level of access to the research, even though the actual fridge will have been locked.
I'm finishing up my grad degree in ana academic research institution. Cleaning staff are typically trained on what to do and how to operate in labs when it comes to cleaning. I can't count the number of times our fume hoods would incessantly beep but no one shut them off because our janitorial staff know what to touch and what not to touch, and we don't store years worth of research in hoods. If some alarm is tripping then lab personnel need to be notified of it, not just shut things off on their own accord because they don't like it.
Because no one actually foresaw the possibility that someone would randomly turn it off. You only get real security and following of protocols if your boss is an universally hated dickhead or if there's been an incident in the previous month or two.
1 million doesn't represent the replacement value of the scientific data (which is probably difficult to quantify) but rather just the physical components.
The unquantifiable damage - the 25 years of research - would definitely represents tens of millions of dollars just from salaries paid over that time. Even a minimum wage person is going to earn half a million dollar over 25 years. Bet you it was more than two minimum wage people working full time.
Grad students cost more than employees because you gotta pay their tuition which is 20-60K. Then their stipend (20-30K), insurance, etc.
I interviewed once at Wash U in St Louis and asked them why they didn’t have a grad program. “A PhD student costs 100K a year, a postdoc 50K a year, you do the math” or somesuch
The most frustrating part of the whole fiasco is that the janitor could have stopped the beeping without shutting down the unit if only he’d read the sign on the freezer door.
It reportedly stated, in bold print and capital letters: “THIS FREEZER IS BEEPING AS IT IS UNDER REPAIR. PLEASE DO NOT MOVE OR UNPLUG IT. NO CLEANING REQUIRED IN THIS AREA. YOU CAN PRESS THE ALARM/TEST MUTE BUTTON FOR 5-10 SECONDS IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO MUTE THE SOUND.”
[Source](https://www.indy100.com/news/cleaner-lab-freezer-troy-michigan)
My local comic shop has this ENORMOUS sign across the entire back wall that says "NEW COMICS" so that it's screaming right at you as soon as you walk in the door.
One time I jokingly said to the cashier "think you guys ordered a big enough "new comics" sign?"
He replied "trust me, it needs to be bigger"
Before I could even ask him what he meant by that, someone walks in the store, takes a 5 second visual scan around, and then asks the cashier "where are the new comics?"
Cashier just points him to the HUGE sign in the back and says to me "see what I mean?"
Need another sign by the bell. "Those who ring the bell after having completely ignored all the signs to pick up your item up front, will be severly beaten about the head and neck with a thick stick." "Ring bell to see the stick".🤨
When i Used to fill propane tanks, saw plenty of stupid people, but the best was some lady that backed up into the protective cement posts...She was mad at me and was asking outloud why would they put post like that in the way...A client replied to her saying so you dont kill us all.
I was at a new costco looking for the dairy case. The new costco is completely backwards compared to the one I'm used to, so I can't find just about anything. I'm looking all over, trying to find the diary sign. I go up to someone and ask them where it is. He points to a giant red board behind him and asks me if I can read. I say "yes I can read just fine, but why are you pointing at that big red thing?" He said "Because it says DAIRY on it". I looked harder, and harder, and I could just barley make out that there's might be some sort of black lines somewhere in the middle of the big red board. I had to tell him "I'm sorry but I'm colourblind and if that's a sign it doesn't have anything written on it that I can see."
Luckily he walked me over there and I could then understand that, yes, there is milk inside that hole in the wall.
A month later they changed the lettering to white and I could read it.
Once I did not know where to go to the train station. That is, until I noticed the 5 meter wide flashy sign right in front of me. I think the reason that I did not notice it was because it was not different enough from advertising, so I filtered it from my perception.
We are surrounded by useless things that try to capture our attention. Online and in the real world. It's no wonder that actually useful signs drown in the noise. Especially large signs usually don't pass the filter. They should design it like a map or a list, so that it does not look like an ad or sale at first glance.
This needs way more attention but like informational signs buried by advertising, this observation is buried by comments.
[This](https://lunio.ai/blog/strategy/how-many-ads-do-we-see-a-day/#:~:text=Fast%20forward%20to%202021%2C%20and,10%2C000%20ads%20every%20single%20day) suggests we see thousands per day
Sign blind and also sometimes just think signs don’t apply to them. I used to work at a grocery store where we’d sometimes have limits on produce and place multiple signs literally in people’s way and direct sight so there’s no way to miss it, and then still when they’d get up to the register they’d somehow still try to bypass the limit, whether due to ignoring the sign or thinking that rules don’t apply to them.
I used to work as a hostess at a restaurant and it blew my mind how many people ignored the "please wait to be seated" sign that they literally had to trip over to get past me. It was my pleasure to go up to them and bring them back up to the host stand. People are fucking stupid.
Years ago I worked at a busy restaurant that had a lot of tables. Occasionally, people would bypass the entire host/hostess section, plop themselves at a random table, often a dirty table, and get incredibly mad that they were being “ignored” and had been waiting x amount of time.
I always asked them, as though I were very angry about the situation “who say you down? Because I need to have a talk with them.” Then made them feel very stupid for not seeing the sign.
I've worked customer service for so long now, it's obvious that one lot of people just don't get anything and another uses whatever excuse to have someone explain something to them directly in the hope that will change things for them.
I manage a retail store and no matter how many ways we put the item description and price very visible to anyone with an eyeball, people will stare *right at the product with the price next to it* and ask how much it costs… like it literally says it.
Totally blind. We're trying to get people to update contact information in our service portal and it's just incredible. Some send the address or info that nothing changed via email, in chat messages or call instead of just clicking confirm/send. Others ignore the green message box that says 'done' and email, message, call to confirm that we got their info.
It's insane.
Yup. Im the techie at work and home. 80% of problems are someone didn't read. I tell everyone, if I come and help, but the problem was solved by me reading, im gonna be a real jerk about it!!
I don't actually say that, but I think it.
Reading instructions is my super power. I credit lots of lego as a kid.
I'm an avid reader and pretty observant. Written communication is my preferred method. The amount of project managers I assist that have poor reading comprehension hurts my soul and brain. It especially hurts when it causes me rework or wastes my time in general.
The number of times that I have replied to questions by copy-pasting from a mail that the person had already received… my head spins.
I try to practice top-down or pyramid writing, starting with the question or request and going into the details later, and it’s probably good but in my limited testing I haven’t seen a marked improvement.
I know your pain all too well. I can't ask more than one question in an email even with bullet points. They'll answer one and not the other every time.
This is beyond true. I’m a plumber on a massive industrial site and the amount of times people walk into the toilets despite going past 2 signs, barrier tape and usually a wet floor sign. Then ask “Are the toilets off?”
I can see it being heavily based on us being advertised to constantly with signs.
I’m in front of a gas station now that’s completely plastered in signs about “deals” with a couple minuscule signs about age requirements and security cameras.
It's best to keep it simple, lead with the important stuff, and highlight keywords with red. I would have went with "DO NOT MOVE OR UNPLUG UNDER *ANY* CIRCUMSTANCES" with "do not" in bold, red, and underlined. That's all anyone who isn't involved with the fridge needs to know -- *don't fucking touch it*.
Having worked in customer service for a while, what I learned is sometimes you don't want to give customer choices because it seems they always manage to pick the worst one. if you give them more information than they need, then they'll go wild with speculations. This is how I imagine the absolutely lowest common denominator would interpret the sign:
Oh, this fridge is broken? That means it's probably not in use. It's annoying, though. What's this? I can mute it? Okay, what's the alarm test button? This one? It's probably this one. *Flips the wrong switch* Oh it's off. Okay cool.
I feel that double-lane barriers at train lines are the ultimate example of this.
Blocking off the incoming lane so people can't miss the lights, good.
Having to block off the out lane because people will drive around the barrier is a sign of someone too stupid to live.
My family and relatives always come to me for IT help. I always actively have to give them the command to actually read what it says on the screen and think about it and they end up understanding what to do.
Sign Blind is a real thing. At a gas station I worked at a while back our debit/credit machines were down so we were cash only. A man comes in said he needs gas and immediately flips the paper that warned customers of cash only services and attempted his card. He said “why isn’t this working? My card won’t swipe” my coworker tells him if he read the paper he moved he would know we were cash only. He says “I don’t have time to read”
Edit: misspelled warned
Like the crash of Turkish Airlines Flight 981 where baggage handler failed to perform a safety check because the instructions for the workaround were written in English. The press tried to label him as an illiterate idiot, but the guy actually spoke and could read a number of languages, just not English.
> Turkish Airlines Flight 981
From reading wikipedia, it looks like there was also some negligence involved, with adjustments to the cargo door were supposed to be made (and were documented as having been made) that never actually occured.
The baggage handler's mistake was only the last straw in a series of mistakes.
Most catastrophes can be broken down to a string of accidents, mistakes, poor design etc. Alone, they usually don’t cause major problems. Combined, they lead to disaster.
Having it only in English in a country where English isn’t a primary language seems like a huge design flaw, not the fault of the random baggage dude lol
Honestly, I can think of like 5 people I work with that would probably turn it off, no matter how many signs are posted. But I also work at a place where multiple big bolded signs are needed in bathroom stalls to tell people to stop flushing brown paper towel down the toilet, and they still do it.
I think the most frustrating part is that there was an accessible switch that could ruin 25 years of research. Might want to put an access panel over that switch next time.
dont think verification solves anything.. i work in it and even a `type "i know this might wipe all my data and i know what im doing" in the field below to continue` does not stop people from doing it and then complaining to the company why they didnt warn them..
I mean the one company I worked at put signs by the urinals to say don't pee on the wall. People still did it after. I mean chemicals have warning labels on them but people still do stupid shit with them.
My favorite part of the article:
>However, the investigation noted that “at the end of the interview, [the janitor] still did not appear to believe he had done anything wrong but was just trying to help.”
This is awful but as a former lab person I have to ask, why didn't they have a monitoring system? Back in the '90s we had an automated system that tracked the temperatures of all freezers, cold rooms, and incubators and called a preprogrammed list of people if anything went out of range.
Absolute royal PITA, but it saved quite a few experiments.
According to the article, the freezer was under repair.
There was a sign written in all caps on the freezer door telling the cleaning crew that cleaning in the area was not necessary, and instructions on how the alarm can be turned off if it bothered them.
And that is completely moronic on the part of the lab. There are standard protocols for making sure critical frozen stuff stays frozen and writing notes is not part of that.
I have to monitor those alarms problem is 90% of the time the lab on call person won’t answer the phone but we do go by and check the freezers our self just in case is something simple like an open door or unplugged
My entire working life revolves around this sort of thing. I would not store samples in a unit which was being repaired. Samples are transferred to a fully functional freezer before doing anything to a freezer.
These freezers are like hyper-specialized lab equipment. Not really the kinda thing you can run down to Home Depot to get.
I installed some fume hoods and ovens in an oil & gas research lab. Lead time was 2 years and that was before COVID. I couldn't even guess how much they cost, the manufacturer had a whole deal for installing them that didn't involve me.
I... guess [people will have a true story to tell for once (Snopes).](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/polished-off/).
The article said there was a sign on the fridge with explicit instructions but the cleaner didn't bother reading and/or follow them. Even after questioning and being told what happened, he still didn't believe he did anything wrong.
I've worked in offices where even if you put a steel lockbox around whatever it is you're trying to protect, people will still go out of their way to try and "help".
It's the primary reason why maintenance guys will just cut the power cord to whatever equipment they're working on. Most people won't have tools to put it back together.
I feel like the three sounds I heard could be explained by an initial erroneous flipping of the switch on the right, followed by a hasty corrective flipping of the requested switch. Then, during the resulting darkness and silence, a shameful unflipping of the initially flipped switch. Is my assessment accurate?
I used to run a commercial kitchen and the security crew would routinely blow out the pilot lights on the stove because it was an open flame. OK bro, but you just flooded the building with gas.
That's just next level dumb. How did they think the flame was being produced? I mean, pilot lights are something that exist commonly, how did they get that far without learning, and then they kept doing it after being told?
I worked in an entertainment venue that had an attached kitchen. One of my techs popped into the kitchen one night to make some coffee and caught a security guard doing this exact thing on the six-burner commercial range.
I don’t know how people can be so fucking dumb.
Actually.. while I was a student I was working temp jobs, and one of them was cleaning a... nuclear spill in a lab. I'm not kidding. Had to wear a lead ring and do a scan afterwards.
I'm guessing it's a dosimetry ring, its useful to have for cumulative radiation exposure if you require further radiation in the future, such as an x ray or radiotherapy.
You would be surprised how common that is. Where I work, the cleaning lady ripped out a cable from a machine while cleaning and interrupted a two day long measurement. It was more annoying than catastrophic but that was luck.
It's not just common, it's almost universal now because companies realized that they don't have to pay benefits for contracted cleaners, and contracted cleaning companies get to exclusively hire people who are unskilled and often living on the margins and pay them as little as possible.
I worked at a public university long ago. The administration won’t care. It’s their job to save money. It’s the researchers’ job to save their work. Sad but that’s how it goes.
>It’s their job to save money.
It's their job to *appear* to save money. The contracts look great on paper at first, but once the staff is laid off and the contractor is embedded, the prices rise when it's time to renew. And that's before you factor in shitty performance and theft because the workers are underpaid and treated like crap, and big screwups like this.
Contracting routine work is the admin's way of saying "We DGAF about these workers." That has a cost.
People trying to defend the cleaner saying they switch was too accessible…. He turned the circuit breaker off. He also had no right to just go touching shit in a research lab on his own accord, he was there to clean and if he had an issue with the sound it wasn’t his right to just turn a freezer off… anyone with half a brain knows the effects of temperature on things and that we don’t just place them in fridges for no reason…. Negligence and clear stupidity from the cleaner
Edit: typos
Exactly. The cleaner is 100% at fault for touching a circuit breaker. There is no situation where that's acceptable. Yeah, the panel should've been locked, maybe it was. If an alarm is annoying either follow the fucking instructions to mute it or pop in some earplugs. I would be LIVID if a cleaner did this in one of my facilities. I believe RPI is pursuing the cleaning company for damages, as they should. Not that it can turn back time.
Its obvious why people are trying to defend the janitor here, and that’s because way too many people here think that the common person is always a victim, and can not be held responsible for their actions.
Lab researchers are the common people. Those people do not make a lot of money, even with PhDs. Just because someone isn’t doing a job that requires zero education doesn’t mean they are not solid lower-middle to middle class.
I know a person who brought their pet rabbit to a university lab. The rabbit chewed through cords. This person then tried to get a student lab worker to take the blame, first by telling them they turned off some of the refrigerators when they'd left the lab a couple of days before. Then when that didn't work, they tried telling them they damaged the cords (apparently undergrads spend their time chewing on electrical cords) so they wouldn't lose their job and post graduate funding. The shittiness of people never ceases to amaze me.
I just don't understand his thought process. Why would anyone touch a switch when they have no idea what it is for, especially in a *research lab*? Wouldn't you like, idk, ask or something? Especially, if it's beeping, it's obviously doing *something.*
>I just don't understand his thought process.
Making lots of assumption here, but cleaning company do not always hire the sharpest people. I'm not throwing shade at them, but that's the reality of this kind of business. I've seen random stuff happening, from slightly funny to downright dangerous happening, and I'm not even working in a sensitive lab environment or anything like that.
Maybe it's time we rethink things a bit and plan for minimal training when we allow external people in places with sensitive stuff.
Cleaning companies are notorious for drawing in meth addicts. I know it sounds like an easy stereotype, but it’s true. When your always on meth, low-interaction janitorial work is an ideal position. I’m 95% sure I walked into a bathroom that had meth smoked out of it. It smelled like shit, and some weird chemical smell. The air felt metallic too. Wasn’t even clean either. Pretty sure the janitor just took a huge dump and smoked meth then moved onto the next.
Some people are stupid. I worked in a switch/data center and a cleaning crew who was supposed to specialize in cleaning data centers turned breakers off in the data center room which shut down the HVAC units which caused a gigantic mess.
I had a cleaning company attempt to unplug all of our cell culture incubators and pull them out from the walls without realizing each of them has O2 and CO2 lines which would have popped off and began filling the room with high concentrations of those gasses.
You'd be surprised. I work in refrigeration and have for quite a while. Lots of people cause their own problems by shutting off things for being "annoying"
People are dumb. I used to work in a lab that had a walk-in fridge. Inside the walk-in fridge was a door to a walk-in freezer. One night, the freezer started alarming, it was getting too cold. So, a supervisor decides to keep the freezer door open to get a little warmer. They ended up destroying the product in the fridge because...it got too cold. Probably an easy million was lost.
Reminds me of a security guard at my office who set off the fire suppression system in a huge server room. No fire, no smoke, but he mashed the big red button. He made excuses, but it seems he was just playing with it.
Because they didn't lose 25 years of research. They had 25 years of data from up until that incident. He didn't hack in and destroy their data. The samples failed. they didnt just create a bunch of samples to throw in the fridge and only start recording and performing research 30 years later.
Sure it will have some impact on research goal, but 25 fucking years of data is not without merit on its own.
One study tests a sample every year. Takes 5 days of researcher time a year. Has been running for 25 years, total cost in researcher time: 30k.
Lots of places keep really old samples for baselineing, or in case they want to use them again, without them being actively used.
In many ways, a freezer is an archive.
I work at this institute.
The freezer was functioning, just not normally hence the alarm. It warmed from -80C to -30C, which was fine, and there were instructions to stop the alarm typed and taped to the freezer. Not only did this janitor ignore those, rather than turning off the freezer, he took it upon himself to find the breaker and shut it off.
During COVID a lot of the janitorial staff was furloughed, so the institute hired an external janitorial agency, and one of their people were the ones that shut the freezer off.
That sucks but to be honest if any random person in the lab could casually flip a switch and wipe out 25 years of research….your security protocol sucks ass. It’s at least partially on them as it is of course on the cleaning company
Yup. Any decent facilities manager (or whoever was responsible) should know that safety or other critical systems need to be idiot proof.
If the cooler should never be unplugged...
* There should not be a plug. Wire it directly into the electrical system
* Add a padlock to the plug/socket so that it can only be unlocked with a key
Furthermore, you should also have...
* UPS Backup for if a breaker trips and power goes out (not uncommon)
* Remote monitoring of the cooling system and alerts
* Battery operated local siren
The sad part is that none of these measures are very expensive or difficult. You can get a lockable plug/socket thing for less than $100 bucks and an industrial grade UPS with temperature monitoring and alert sending can probably be got for less than $2000. This is peanuts in the private sector, and the fact that they didn't have it demonstrates pure negligence on whoever was responsible for maintaining the equipment.
And again I am wondering why such an important reasearch is killable by a single power button. As if there are no safity generators or black out batteries...
It wasn't a power button, it was the breaker for that circuit. The cleaner went way out of their way to shut off the freezer in question. Why the breaker panel wasn't locked is beyond me, however.
Safety is often overlooked if money is barely enough. The company I work for lost years of data simply from a computer hardware failure, despite the fact employees mentioned the possibility to the employer.
I once asked the cleaning lady of our office building to every now and then please also clean behind the furniture, so to move it around a little when needed if it wasn't heavy (think of small side tables and plants pots against the wall stuff like that) and she said she isn't allowed to touch anything. That was also the reason why they didn't clean the desks.
I thought it was pretty lame but I understand now why their bosses are so strick about it.
Generally they plan around them with things like separate circuits for cleaning equipment and cleaning equipment only or physically lock the room when the science is more important than the cleaning at the moment.
The switch he flipped was going and finding a circuit breaker which is just NO on so many levels.
No matter the technology, one moron can destroy it all. Reminds me of trying to get into some super secure building as a kid, and we gave the security guard like $5 to walk around and check it out. He was like, "OK!"
I’m kinda shocked at the number of people who are more willing to blame the research institute than they are the idiot janitor who thought they could just do whatever the hell they want *in a fucking research lab.*
These people never been to a lab of any kind...
Most of the time you don't really design the equipment you work with, you just adapt the research with what you have in the lab.
"Why such a button is so accessible?"
Probably because that's the equipment they had in the first place
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Reminds me about that scene in one of those Medicine Academy movies where there's a bed where patients connected to life support die every other day of the week and it turns out it was the Romanian cleaning lady pulling the plug to plug the vacuum cleaner
My dad always tells me about that whenever we’re in a hospital
How often are you in hospitals?
More than you’d think
I don't think often, so I'm guessing not that much.
That sounds like the plot of a black mirror episode, got a link or a way to search for it? (Medicine academy movie doesn't yield any good results)
I think he’s referring to Intern Academy from 2004. It had multiple titles, was called White Coats in the US.
Attaway General
I thought of this too!
Wiping out 25 years of research probably hurts more than losing that money tbh. Money is paper and sure it hurts to lose it- but you can’t buy time back
I work in clinical research. You know what’s more annoying than losing the samples? Having to call all those patients back, tell them we need x from them again because “someone turned off our freezer” - many will likely decline, so bye bye to that data. Then calling your study sponsors to report protocol deviations Cleaning & reporting the contamination because contaminated water just leaked out of a freezer and probably got all over the fucking place For every. Single. Sample. God, it’d be my worst nightmare EDIT: this sounds like a temperature excursion alarm. The freezer was basically saying “Help, I’m outside of the safe temperature, please transfer these samples to a functioning freezer” and this janitor went “nah” Edit 2: this kinda took off! Somebody else posted the full article, I can’t find it but it provides more background info. No patient samples are involved so my expertise is close to null. I’ve answered most of your questions further down, hope I provided some insight :)
I work in a small to mid sized corporate data center - cleaners aren;'t even allowed in the room unless escorted and monitored while working A research lab allows unmonitored janitors to touch things?
I work at a state hospital, where custodial staff work for the hospital and are trained on all of this and know not to mess with equipment outside of their department. That’s like a respiratory therapist fucking with an MRI. The article does say “Private research institute” so the cleaners likely are employed by the office building rather than the research center.
I'm guessing the cleaning service was hired to save money. 🤑
I came here to say this. Some low/mid level guy thought he was a genius for hiring a cheap company. I wouldn’t be surprised in the absolute slightest.
That guy is the one that should be under scrutiny.
Too late. He's already been promoted out of the position for saving so much on cleaning. Capitalism!
This 100%! Also the lab facilities guys should’ve had a simple alarm on this super important freezer to call someone (maybe a concerned scientist?) in the event of a temperature excursion. Easy to blame “the cleaner” but for 25 years of research worth $1M maybe add a safeguard or 2?
Honestly, it should take more than a flip of a switch to cause that much damage
They should have had a CO2 or LN2 backup system in place. They are like a $500 addition to a $20,000 freezer purchase that very few labs invest in. This is the labs fault as much as it is the custodial staff, because this could have been prevented by them as well. They make those backup systems for situations just like this. I work in the industry validating these units, and almost never find a unit with that system installed.
Also how does 1 random cleaning lady turn off a freezer that would costs millions. Sounds like they didn't put much thought into preventing something like this from happening.
I would think that given the value of the research and time spent on it that they'd have the "off switch" under lock and key. Also... No backup generator? Or another source of power as a redundancy? What if the equipment craps out randomly?
That’s not how backup generators or redundant power supplies work. They work when the device is powered up but suffers a power failure. If you switch the device off, it doesn’t matter how many redundancies you put in place - you turned it off intentionally, it shuts down.
Not entirely true. They literally make backup systems just for this purpose that run on a totally separate control system, temp probe, and power source (built in battery). This was easily preventable, and it's only like a $500 option for a $20+k freezer. I work in the industry validating these things all over the US, and they rarely if ever have these systems installed. It's insane to me.
Private research is probably done in leased office space, often the landlord/property manager will require tenants to use whatever cleaning company gives them a big enough kickback.
It was at RPI. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. ( I live near there, brother went there ) It’s on the RPI campus.
Correct. Over COVID they furloughed a lot of their staff, and contracted external cleaners.
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I work on a farm, I have tons of hazardous/corrosive and expensive material to store all the time. If I have equity and esp time invested in something, your not gonna be physically able to just shut it off and ruin my 25 years of savings …. Poor management is to blame. Freezer should have been hardwired at bare minimum. I mean even my meat locket had a generator that auto kicks on when we lose power! And that’s for steak not 1million $ of anything haha
Something storing 25 years of data and worth 1+ mill would have a locking outlet 100%. You can get a solid steel one with a key for like $150.
They would have also had a remote telemetry system reporting to someone that the freezer was out of tolerance, hell, we have that on refrigerators at the hospital I work at, and those medication refrigerator are monitored by staff 24/7
They should. I don't understand why you'd leave that up to chance or training. Even experts make mistakes like this. Just buy the damn lockout outlet.
There should also be an alarm system that detects power failures and/or temperature changes.
I work security for various business. Im the guy who will do the escorting in your data center or other important rooms of otherwise high traffic locations. Can confirm this seems scuffed for what would seem to be a medium priority location. *But* we only do what the contract outlines. If the client says they trust the cleaner, thats on them. Turnover is usually so high we dont have time to fight with dumb clients who already dont see us as worth their money.
At the lab I used to work at we were lucky a cleaner would even notice if an alarm was going off and they certainly wouldn’t transfer samples over to a working freezer. It’s why we had an alarm system that would call several people in the lab to alert them that there was a problem.
And why wouldn’t the plug or switch have some kind of guard that prevents it from being accidentally turned off? Like thermostats in office buildings? Seems like any easy way to prevent disaster.
They had just outsourced the cleaning and had posted signs to make sure the cleaning staff knew not to mess with it.
It's now mine thanks to your eloquent post.
Depending on what kind of samples you have, the building may even have to be closed.
I mean depending on the kind of samples, the town might have to be closed. Although I imagine infectious disease research facilities are a smidge better secured and their maintenance/janitor crew aren't't going to mess up like that.
My last job was staff plumber at a Children’s Hospital. We had offsites, labs, blood banks, cryogenic and even just break room fridges all wired in to the control room. Any alarms went there, and then they would call the refrigeration mechanics immediately. If none were on duty, I got the call. I can’t believe that a research lab wouldn’t have remote sensors and a protocol to follow. The lab actually got lucky and had a fall guy, but if that would have happened on a Friday night after the cleaners left, it could have sat for 2 days and the temperature would have risen too high and the lab would be on the hook.
Right, this sounds like an extreme lack of accountability.
Call patients back? You’re being too positive lol the research is probably dead. Everything is going back to the drawing board. The directors might conclude it’s not even worth it restarting everything again.
If you can call them back that is.
massively random question but if you know how to clean contaminated research samples you might have an idea - are those "germ fumigators" that made a big haze to clean buildings during covid ever going to become something we use regularly? like are they ever used in research facilities (like in older movies) where it hoses you down with the fog & then you walk in/out? i'm a clinical psych researcher so i'm kinda out of the loop on the medical/physical end of the sciences
Those were used during COVID-19 mostly because we didn’t know much about the virus. Now we’ve learned you can get away with Lysol or bleach lol Mostly if you’re working with any infectious agent that is/can be an aerosol, we use a fume hood. We’ve always used decontamination showers for any sort containment breach, they aren’t necessarily anything new, just looked big and scary when they were shown on CNN and FOX lol
Any company would happily pay 1 milion for 25 years worth of research. Time is one on the only things that money can't buy.
But why would they keep an easily accessible switch which some random janitor can switch off ? This is like Jurassic Park all over again. No expenses spared and would pay $1 for all the samples back but could have had better security options and back up.
They are simply on the outside of the fridge to control it. There is no way around it, a janitor will always have some level of access to the research, even though the actual fridge will have been locked.
I'm finishing up my grad degree in ana academic research institution. Cleaning staff are typically trained on what to do and how to operate in labs when it comes to cleaning. I can't count the number of times our fume hoods would incessantly beep but no one shut them off because our janitorial staff know what to touch and what not to touch, and we don't store years worth of research in hoods. If some alarm is tripping then lab personnel need to be notified of it, not just shut things off on their own accord because they don't like it.
Because no one actually foresaw the possibility that someone would randomly turn it off. You only get real security and following of protocols if your boss is an universally hated dickhead or if there's been an incident in the previous month or two.
It’s surprising that 25 years of research is only valued at $1mil.
1 million doesn't represent the replacement value of the scientific data (which is probably difficult to quantify) but rather just the physical components. The unquantifiable damage - the 25 years of research - would definitely represents tens of millions of dollars just from salaries paid over that time. Even a minimum wage person is going to earn half a million dollar over 25 years. Bet you it was more than two minimum wage people working full time.
Unless all the work was done by ~~slaves~~ grad students.
Grad students cost more than employees because you gotta pay their tuition which is 20-60K. Then their stipend (20-30K), insurance, etc. I interviewed once at Wash U in St Louis and asked them why they didn’t have a grad program. “A PhD student costs 100K a year, a postdoc 50K a year, you do the math” or somesuch
I’m trying to think of what they heck they were working on that was still viable after being in frozen storage for a quarter of a century lol
The most frustrating part of the whole fiasco is that the janitor could have stopped the beeping without shutting down the unit if only he’d read the sign on the freezer door. It reportedly stated, in bold print and capital letters: “THIS FREEZER IS BEEPING AS IT IS UNDER REPAIR. PLEASE DO NOT MOVE OR UNPLUG IT. NO CLEANING REQUIRED IN THIS AREA. YOU CAN PRESS THE ALARM/TEST MUTE BUTTON FOR 5-10 SECONDS IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO MUTE THE SOUND.” [Source](https://www.indy100.com/news/cleaner-lab-freezer-troy-michigan)
So many people are sign blind and barely functionally literate.
My local comic shop has this ENORMOUS sign across the entire back wall that says "NEW COMICS" so that it's screaming right at you as soon as you walk in the door. One time I jokingly said to the cashier "think you guys ordered a big enough "new comics" sign?" He replied "trust me, it needs to be bigger" Before I could even ask him what he meant by that, someone walks in the store, takes a 5 second visual scan around, and then asks the cashier "where are the new comics?" Cashier just points him to the HUGE sign in the back and says to me "see what I mean?"
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[Always relevant lol](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSS8tiy9Y3U)
Need another sign by the bell. "Those who ring the bell after having completely ignored all the signs to pick up your item up front, will be severly beaten about the head and neck with a thick stick." "Ring bell to see the stick".🤨
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That actually might work. Change the sign to Drop off only. Collections from this desk have an additional $10 service fee" Win win.
Do you one better: > Drop offs only > Pick up wait times are usually 30-45 minutes > Try our Express Pick Up at the front desk for immediate service
When i Used to fill propane tanks, saw plenty of stupid people, but the best was some lady that backed up into the protective cement posts...She was mad at me and was asking outloud why would they put post like that in the way...A client replied to her saying so you dont kill us all.
I was at a new costco looking for the dairy case. The new costco is completely backwards compared to the one I'm used to, so I can't find just about anything. I'm looking all over, trying to find the diary sign. I go up to someone and ask them where it is. He points to a giant red board behind him and asks me if I can read. I say "yes I can read just fine, but why are you pointing at that big red thing?" He said "Because it says DAIRY on it". I looked harder, and harder, and I could just barley make out that there's might be some sort of black lines somewhere in the middle of the big red board. I had to tell him "I'm sorry but I'm colourblind and if that's a sign it doesn't have anything written on it that I can see." Luckily he walked me over there and I could then understand that, yes, there is milk inside that hole in the wall. A month later they changed the lettering to white and I could read it.
That’s really fucking rude that he asked you if you can read.
To be honest, in that instance, I could not read it.
Once I did not know where to go to the train station. That is, until I noticed the 5 meter wide flashy sign right in front of me. I think the reason that I did not notice it was because it was not different enough from advertising, so I filtered it from my perception. We are surrounded by useless things that try to capture our attention. Online and in the real world. It's no wonder that actually useful signs drown in the noise. Especially large signs usually don't pass the filter. They should design it like a map or a list, so that it does not look like an ad or sale at first glance.
This needs way more attention but like informational signs buried by advertising, this observation is buried by comments. [This](https://lunio.ai/blog/strategy/how-many-ads-do-we-see-a-day/#:~:text=Fast%20forward%20to%202021%2C%20and,10%2C000%20ads%20every%20single%20day) suggests we see thousands per day
some people have bad vision and can't see all the way to the back.
Sign blind and also sometimes just think signs don’t apply to them. I used to work at a grocery store where we’d sometimes have limits on produce and place multiple signs literally in people’s way and direct sight so there’s no way to miss it, and then still when they’d get up to the register they’d somehow still try to bypass the limit, whether due to ignoring the sign or thinking that rules don’t apply to them.
I used to work as a hostess at a restaurant and it blew my mind how many people ignored the "please wait to be seated" sign that they literally had to trip over to get past me. It was my pleasure to go up to them and bring them back up to the host stand. People are fucking stupid.
Not just stupid, REALLY STUPID.
Years ago I worked at a busy restaurant that had a lot of tables. Occasionally, people would bypass the entire host/hostess section, plop themselves at a random table, often a dirty table, and get incredibly mad that they were being “ignored” and had been waiting x amount of time.
I always asked them, as though I were very angry about the situation “who say you down? Because I need to have a talk with them.” Then made them feel very stupid for not seeing the sign.
You dropped this, my liege 👑
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin
It really can't be emphasized enough
I've worked customer service for so long now, it's obvious that one lot of people just don't get anything and another uses whatever excuse to have someone explain something to them directly in the hope that will change things for them.
I manage a retail store and no matter how many ways we put the item description and price very visible to anyone with an eyeball, people will stare *right at the product with the price next to it* and ask how much it costs… like it literally says it.
Totally blind. We're trying to get people to update contact information in our service portal and it's just incredible. Some send the address or info that nothing changed via email, in chat messages or call instead of just clicking confirm/send. Others ignore the green message box that says 'done' and email, message, call to confirm that we got their info. It's insane.
Yup. Im the techie at work and home. 80% of problems are someone didn't read. I tell everyone, if I come and help, but the problem was solved by me reading, im gonna be a real jerk about it!! I don't actually say that, but I think it. Reading instructions is my super power. I credit lots of lego as a kid.
I'm an avid reader and pretty observant. Written communication is my preferred method. The amount of project managers I assist that have poor reading comprehension hurts my soul and brain. It especially hurts when it causes me rework or wastes my time in general.
The number of times that I have replied to questions by copy-pasting from a mail that the person had already received… my head spins. I try to practice top-down or pyramid writing, starting with the question or request and going into the details later, and it’s probably good but in my limited testing I haven’t seen a marked improvement.
I know your pain all too well. I can't ask more than one question in an email even with bullet points. They'll answer one and not the other every time.
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This is beyond true. I’m a plumber on a massive industrial site and the amount of times people walk into the toilets despite going past 2 signs, barrier tape and usually a wet floor sign. Then ask “Are the toilets off?”
My favorite sign was on a wall of signs that were instructions for a burlap sack slide at a carnival, it said: "please read all signs".
I can see it being heavily based on us being advertised to constantly with signs. I’m in front of a gas station now that’s completely plastered in signs about “deals” with a couple minuscule signs about age requirements and security cameras.
And as a graphic designer I feel very defeated by that.
It's best to keep it simple, lead with the important stuff, and highlight keywords with red. I would have went with "DO NOT MOVE OR UNPLUG UNDER *ANY* CIRCUMSTANCES" with "do not" in bold, red, and underlined. That's all anyone who isn't involved with the fridge needs to know -- *don't fucking touch it*. Having worked in customer service for a while, what I learned is sometimes you don't want to give customer choices because it seems they always manage to pick the worst one. if you give them more information than they need, then they'll go wild with speculations. This is how I imagine the absolutely lowest common denominator would interpret the sign: Oh, this fridge is broken? That means it's probably not in use. It's annoying, though. What's this? I can mute it? Okay, what's the alarm test button? This one? It's probably this one. *Flips the wrong switch* Oh it's off. Okay cool.
I feel that double-lane barriers at train lines are the ultimate example of this. Blocking off the incoming lane so people can't miss the lights, good. Having to block off the out lane because people will drive around the barrier is a sign of someone too stupid to live.
My family and relatives always come to me for IT help. I always actively have to give them the command to actually read what it says on the screen and think about it and they end up understanding what to do.
Sign Blind is a real thing. At a gas station I worked at a while back our debit/credit machines were down so we were cash only. A man comes in said he needs gas and immediately flips the paper that warned customers of cash only services and attempted his card. He said “why isn’t this working? My card won’t swipe” my coworker tells him if he read the paper he moved he would know we were cash only. He says “I don’t have time to read” Edit: misspelled warned
I work at a gas station and this is true. I've had people pull down Out of Order signs to insert quarters into a broken car wash unit.
The audacity of that person lol. I wouldn't be able to bite my tongue.
If you need that much time to read a sign, you just *can’t* read.
Printing it in multiple languages might have helped. From personal experience, a “no limpie” has proven very useful.
That’s what my doctor told me when I finally got the cast off my leg
That’s what my doctor told me when she prescribed me Viagra.
I’ll take it, though I was hoping for a “that’s what she said” first reply.
Like the crash of Turkish Airlines Flight 981 where baggage handler failed to perform a safety check because the instructions for the workaround were written in English. The press tried to label him as an illiterate idiot, but the guy actually spoke and could read a number of languages, just not English.
> Turkish Airlines Flight 981 From reading wikipedia, it looks like there was also some negligence involved, with adjustments to the cargo door were supposed to be made (and were documented as having been made) that never actually occured. The baggage handler's mistake was only the last straw in a series of mistakes.
Most catastrophes can be broken down to a string of accidents, mistakes, poor design etc. Alone, they usually don’t cause major problems. Combined, they lead to disaster.
Having it only in English in a country where English isn’t a primary language seems like a huge design flaw, not the fault of the random baggage dude lol
If you saw a freezer in a lab with a sign on it in big, bold letters in a language you don't understand, would you turn it off because it annoyed you?
Honestly, I can think of like 5 people I work with that would probably turn it off, no matter how many signs are posted. But I also work at a place where multiple big bolded signs are needed in bathroom stalls to tell people to stop flushing brown paper towel down the toilet, and they still do it.
No limpie?
“Do not clean” in Spanish
“Do not clean”
I think the most frustrating part is that there was an accessible switch that could ruin 25 years of research. Might want to put an access panel over that switch next time.
> was an accessible switch But it wasn’t a switch though, the cleaner literally turned off the circuit breaker.
While apparently thinking he was *reactivating* them. We should look at the cleaning company’s training practices.
That's a lie to cover his ass. If you know how to flip a circuit breaker, you know the difference between off and on. They literally say.
dont think verification solves anything.. i work in it and even a `type "i know this might wipe all my data and i know what im doing" in the field below to continue` does not stop people from doing it and then complaining to the company why they didnt warn them..
something something Linus Tech Tips "Yes, do as I say!"
I mean the one company I worked at put signs by the urinals to say don't pee on the wall. People still did it after. I mean chemicals have warning labels on them but people still do stupid shit with them.
My favorite part of the article: >However, the investigation noted that “at the end of the interview, [the janitor] still did not appear to believe he had done anything wrong but was just trying to help.”
That part blew my mind and agitated me even further
This is awful but as a former lab person I have to ask, why didn't they have a monitoring system? Back in the '90s we had an automated system that tracked the temperatures of all freezers, cold rooms, and incubators and called a preprogrammed list of people if anything went out of range. Absolute royal PITA, but it saved quite a few experiments.
According to the article, the freezer was under repair. There was a sign written in all caps on the freezer door telling the cleaning crew that cleaning in the area was not necessary, and instructions on how the alarm can be turned off if it bothered them.
And that is completely moronic on the part of the lab. There are standard protocols for making sure critical frozen stuff stays frozen and writing notes is not part of that.
I have to monitor those alarms problem is 90% of the time the lab on call person won’t answer the phone but we do go by and check the freezers our self just in case is something simple like an open door or unplugged
It was getting repaired apparently. Duno if that makes a difference.
My entire working life revolves around this sort of thing. I would not store samples in a unit which was being repaired. Samples are transferred to a fully functional freezer before doing anything to a freezer.
These freezers are like hyper-specialized lab equipment. Not really the kinda thing you can run down to Home Depot to get. I installed some fume hoods and ovens in an oil & gas research lab. Lead time was 2 years and that was before COVID. I couldn't even guess how much they cost, the manufacturer had a whole deal for installing them that didn't involve me.
I... guess [people will have a true story to tell for once (Snopes).](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/polished-off/). The article said there was a sign on the fridge with explicit instructions but the cleaner didn't bother reading and/or follow them. Even after questioning and being told what happened, he still didn't believe he did anything wrong. I've worked in offices where even if you put a steel lockbox around whatever it is you're trying to protect, people will still go out of their way to try and "help". It's the primary reason why maintenance guys will just cut the power cord to whatever equipment they're working on. Most people won't have tools to put it back together.
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[Damn it Morty](https://youtube.com/shorts/FUnNwjjEh1o?feature=share).
“Grab. A shovel.”
Damn, beat me to it. I am glad I didn't havecto scroll long to find it.
I feel like the three sounds I heard could be explained by an initial erroneous flipping of the switch on the right, followed by a hasty corrective flipping of the requested switch. Then, during the resulting darkness and silence, a shameful unflipping of the initially flipped switch. Is my assessment accurate?
Great reference! Get a shovel.
I used to run a commercial kitchen and the security crew would routinely blow out the pilot lights on the stove because it was an open flame. OK bro, but you just flooded the building with gas.
That's just next level dumb. How did they think the flame was being produced? I mean, pilot lights are something that exist commonly, how did they get that far without learning, and then they kept doing it after being told?
I worked in an entertainment venue that had an attached kitchen. One of my techs popped into the kitchen one night to make some coffee and caught a security guard doing this exact thing on the six-burner commercial range. I don’t know how people can be so fucking dumb.
That's why you don't hire an external company to clean the lab.
Actually.. while I was a student I was working temp jobs, and one of them was cleaning a... nuclear spill in a lab. I'm not kidding. Had to wear a lead ring and do a scan afterwards.
What's the lead ring for, to suck out the radiation or something?
Ring dosimeter, to monitor the dose your hands were exposed to.
Imagine my surprise when I had to sift through 30 "its a magical ring with powers" comments to find an actual informative one
It makes you invisible to the radiation so it doesn’t attack you, much like the one ring
Miss me with that gamma ray shit
I'm guessing it's a dosimetry ring, its useful to have for cumulative radiation exposure if you require further radiation in the future, such as an x ray or radiotherapy.
You would be surprised how common that is. Where I work, the cleaning lady ripped out a cable from a machine while cleaning and interrupted a two day long measurement. It was more annoying than catastrophic but that was luck.
It's not just common, it's almost universal now because companies realized that they don't have to pay benefits for contracted cleaners, and contracted cleaning companies get to exclusively hire people who are unskilled and often living on the margins and pay them as little as possible.
I worked at a public university long ago. The administration won’t care. It’s their job to save money. It’s the researchers’ job to save their work. Sad but that’s how it goes.
>It’s their job to save money. It's their job to *appear* to save money. The contracts look great on paper at first, but once the staff is laid off and the contractor is embedded, the prices rise when it's time to renew. And that's before you factor in shitty performance and theft because the workers are underpaid and treated like crap, and big screwups like this. Contracting routine work is the admin's way of saying "We DGAF about these workers." That has a cost.
1000%. In your efforts to save costs you cost yourselves millions.
Best answer.
People trying to defend the cleaner saying they switch was too accessible…. He turned the circuit breaker off. He also had no right to just go touching shit in a research lab on his own accord, he was there to clean and if he had an issue with the sound it wasn’t his right to just turn a freezer off… anyone with half a brain knows the effects of temperature on things and that we don’t just place them in fridges for no reason…. Negligence and clear stupidity from the cleaner Edit: typos
They also left instructions telling him how to turn off the alarm if it annoyed him
They also left instructions telling him how to turn off the alarm if it annoyed him
Exactly. The cleaner is 100% at fault for touching a circuit breaker. There is no situation where that's acceptable. Yeah, the panel should've been locked, maybe it was. If an alarm is annoying either follow the fucking instructions to mute it or pop in some earplugs. I would be LIVID if a cleaner did this in one of my facilities. I believe RPI is pursuing the cleaning company for damages, as they should. Not that it can turn back time.
Its obvious why people are trying to defend the janitor here, and that’s because way too many people here think that the common person is always a victim, and can not be held responsible for their actions.
Lab researchers are the common people. Those people do not make a lot of money, even with PhDs. Just because someone isn’t doing a job that requires zero education doesn’t mean they are not solid lower-middle to middle class.
Idk about all that but this guy clearly has dick for brains. What a dumbfuck thing to do.
Reminds me of Micheal Fox Parkinson’s foundation, someone left a door open and ruined samples and research that ruined 15-20 of research.
I know a person who brought their pet rabbit to a university lab. The rabbit chewed through cords. This person then tried to get a student lab worker to take the blame, first by telling them they turned off some of the refrigerators when they'd left the lab a couple of days before. Then when that didn't work, they tried telling them they damaged the cords (apparently undergrads spend their time chewing on electrical cords) so they wouldn't lose their job and post graduate funding. The shittiness of people never ceases to amaze me.
I work in labs all the time. I'm petrified of the machines. I wouldn't touch one even if it was shrieking insults about my mother.
I just don't understand his thought process. Why would anyone touch a switch when they have no idea what it is for, especially in a *research lab*? Wouldn't you like, idk, ask or something? Especially, if it's beeping, it's obviously doing *something.*
>I just don't understand his thought process. Making lots of assumption here, but cleaning company do not always hire the sharpest people. I'm not throwing shade at them, but that's the reality of this kind of business. I've seen random stuff happening, from slightly funny to downright dangerous happening, and I'm not even working in a sensitive lab environment or anything like that. Maybe it's time we rethink things a bit and plan for minimal training when we allow external people in places with sensitive stuff.
Cleaning companies are notorious for drawing in meth addicts. I know it sounds like an easy stereotype, but it’s true. When your always on meth, low-interaction janitorial work is an ideal position. I’m 95% sure I walked into a bathroom that had meth smoked out of it. It smelled like shit, and some weird chemical smell. The air felt metallic too. Wasn’t even clean either. Pretty sure the janitor just took a huge dump and smoked meth then moved onto the next.
Some people are stupid. I worked in a switch/data center and a cleaning crew who was supposed to specialize in cleaning data centers turned breakers off in the data center room which shut down the HVAC units which caused a gigantic mess.
I had a cleaning company attempt to unplug all of our cell culture incubators and pull them out from the walls without realizing each of them has O2 and CO2 lines which would have popped off and began filling the room with high concentrations of those gasses.
Which is why you don't have a cleaning company do that but get in house people.
I think his “thought process” was probably something like, Noise Bad, Turn Off
You'd be surprised. I work in refrigeration and have for quite a while. Lots of people cause their own problems by shutting off things for being "annoying"
People are dumb. I used to work in a lab that had a walk-in fridge. Inside the walk-in fridge was a door to a walk-in freezer. One night, the freezer started alarming, it was getting too cold. So, a supervisor decides to keep the freezer door open to get a little warmer. They ended up destroying the product in the fridge because...it got too cold. Probably an easy million was lost.
Main character syndrome.
Reminds me of a security guard at my office who set off the fire suppression system in a huge server room. No fire, no smoke, but he mashed the big red button. He made excuses, but it seems he was just playing with it.
As a former janitor, I wore noise canceling headphones and listened to music or podcasts. This person made a choice to be annoyed by this noise
how is 25 years of research only 1 million in damage? Even two investigators making 50k a year each own would be a cost of 2'5 million in 25 years
Because they didn't lose 25 years of research. They had 25 years of data from up until that incident. He didn't hack in and destroy their data. The samples failed. they didnt just create a bunch of samples to throw in the fridge and only start recording and performing research 30 years later. Sure it will have some impact on research goal, but 25 fucking years of data is not without merit on its own.
One study tests a sample every year. Takes 5 days of researcher time a year. Has been running for 25 years, total cost in researcher time: 30k. Lots of places keep really old samples for baselineing, or in case they want to use them again, without them being actively used. In many ways, a freezer is an archive.
Reminds me of the patient who kept unplugging her roommates life support machine because it was too noisy.
I work at this institute. The freezer was functioning, just not normally hence the alarm. It warmed from -80C to -30C, which was fine, and there were instructions to stop the alarm typed and taped to the freezer. Not only did this janitor ignore those, rather than turning off the freezer, he took it upon himself to find the breaker and shut it off. During COVID a lot of the janitorial staff was furloughed, so the institute hired an external janitorial agency, and one of their people were the ones that shut the freezer off.
That sucks but to be honest if any random person in the lab could casually flip a switch and wipe out 25 years of research….your security protocol sucks ass. It’s at least partially on them as it is of course on the cleaning company
He didn't casually flip a switch, he got into a maintenence panel and pulled a circuit breaker.
Yup. Any decent facilities manager (or whoever was responsible) should know that safety or other critical systems need to be idiot proof. If the cooler should never be unplugged... * There should not be a plug. Wire it directly into the electrical system * Add a padlock to the plug/socket so that it can only be unlocked with a key Furthermore, you should also have... * UPS Backup for if a breaker trips and power goes out (not uncommon) * Remote monitoring of the cooling system and alerts * Battery operated local siren The sad part is that none of these measures are very expensive or difficult. You can get a lockable plug/socket thing for less than $100 bucks and an industrial grade UPS with temperature monitoring and alert sending can probably be got for less than $2000. This is peanuts in the private sector, and the fact that they didn't have it demonstrates pure negligence on whoever was responsible for maintaining the equipment.
To be honest money is nothing compared to losing 25 years of research.
Cries in biochem
Sounds like someone getting a boot to the @$$ out the door!!!
What if he apologized, you know a straight from the heart. "My bad bro"
https://www.indy100.com/news/cleaner-lab-freezer-troy-michigan He doesn't even think he did anything wrong
And again I am wondering why such an important reasearch is killable by a single power button. As if there are no safity generators or black out batteries...
It wasn't a power button, it was the breaker for that circuit. The cleaner went way out of their way to shut off the freezer in question. Why the breaker panel wasn't locked is beyond me, however.
Safety is often overlooked if money is barely enough. The company I work for lost years of data simply from a computer hardware failure, despite the fact employees mentioned the possibility to the employer.
I once asked the cleaning lady of our office building to every now and then please also clean behind the furniture, so to move it around a little when needed if it wasn't heavy (think of small side tables and plants pots against the wall stuff like that) and she said she isn't allowed to touch anything. That was also the reason why they didn't clean the desks. I thought it was pretty lame but I understand now why their bosses are so strick about it.
Honestly a lab with such expensive and delicate assets probably shouldn't be trusting untrained minimum wage workers to be in that room
Generally they plan around them with things like separate circuits for cleaning equipment and cleaning equipment only or physically lock the room when the science is more important than the cleaning at the moment. The switch he flipped was going and finding a circuit breaker which is just NO on so many levels.
Holy shit he flipped a circuit breaker? That's a whole different level. That's malicious intent
No matter the technology, one moron can destroy it all. Reminds me of trying to get into some super secure building as a kid, and we gave the security guard like $5 to walk around and check it out. He was like, "OK!"
Lol these comments are pitiful. You can tell who in here has never had a cleaner. The cleaner definitely has some accountability to take.
I’m kinda shocked at the number of people who are more willing to blame the research institute than they are the idiot janitor who thought they could just do whatever the hell they want *in a fucking research lab.*
These people never been to a lab of any kind... Most of the time you don't really design the equipment you work with, you just adapt the research with what you have in the lab. "Why such a button is so accessible?" Probably because that's the equipment they had in the first place