Dear Undergrad,
When I remind you that you should not be wearing gloves in the hallway/departmental office/computer lab (anywhere but at your research bench!) please do not respond with any of the following:
1. "Oh, I forgot I was wearing them."
2. Look at me, and then proceed to run your (gloved) hand all over the wall/door/keyboard.
or, my personal anti-favorite:
3. "But I didn't touch anything!"
Sincerely,
Dr. Reaction
4 comments:
I find #2 hysterical... Not if I'd have to put up with it, but reading it... pretty hysterical.
The sad thing is at my institution, this isn't only limited to undergrads. How do you become a post-doc and not realize that wearing gloves in the stairwell and opening and shutting doors that everyone else touches, is NOT appropriate?
I once had an undergrad tell me, "Well, they say that door handles have more germs than your toilet seat. So..." S/he then proceeded to gesture with hir hands in a see-I'm-just-trying-to-protect-myself sort of way.
I had to point out that E. coli=germs. And direct hir to the bleach solution to clean said door handles.
#2 is pretty funny!
Why can't people just say okay and then do what you said? I'm sick of people always having excuses in response to criticism. Someone in my lab gave a practice talk recently and every comment we made was met with a "yeah, but...". So annoying.
I have to admit I walk around with gloves all the time. But in my case, the purpose of the gloves is more like rubber gloves for dish washing rather for protection from anything bad. It probably violates some rules and scares the custodians though. Fortunately, there are no undergrads around so I'm not providing a bad example.
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