30 December 06
Freezers in the Loo
I’ve written here before about the fact that a freezer containing cheetah and island fox samples sits in the women’s room at work. Today Numenius and I stopped by to pick up some newspapers I’d been soaking for a compost layer and I heard beeping. The freezer had gone from its normal -79°C to -25°C and was alarmed! alarmed! We lost power on Thursday night and I assumed this was somehow related.
This is a long weekend, New Year’s Eve weekend. I tried five numbers before I reached a person, who said he’d get his wife to call me back on her cell. More logistics. She asked me to look into the other freezers, one a -80° freezer and two -40°s. They were all full of pelican and elk bits; no room for spare fox carcasses, alas….
Eventually the professor in charge of the island fox project was reached; eventually she cleared out a bunch of other samples from some coolers, and eventually I met her and a student at the Wildlife Health Center to transfer this critical material to a separate place where it can be kept frozen.
Revco. The freezer company. It turns out there are hundreds of these stories, of freezers going on the fritz over holiday weekends. There are two kinds of freezers, apparently: the ones that have failed and the ones that are going to fail. (ALWAYS on a holiday weekend.)
Good thing I was looking in on the compost. By Tuesday, that freezer would have been stinking and the loo would have been flooded with fetid canid bodily fluids.
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That happened once, to a freezer near my office. It went on the blink during a weekend, and we came in to bird-, deer- and beaver-parts swimming in water and body fluids. You were lucky!
fetid canid… bleugh
Happy new year!
Hey, I think it’s Numenius’ turn to blog, but who will answer this meme? And how many have you already received? Here goes…. consider yourself tagged!
Here are the Rules: Each player of this game starts with the six weird things about you. People who get tagged need to write a blog of their own 6 weird things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose 6 people to be tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave a comment that says you are tagged in their comments and tell them to read your blog.
Happy New Year!!
Happy New Year Pica and Numenius!
When I started in on this story I couldn’t at first for the life of me figure out what you were talking about. Cheetah? Island fox? Pelicans and elks? -79˚ freezers? But it all made sense in the end… sort of.
My question, as a mountain climber… why does it always rain on the weekends, but never during the week?