Story 1: Daily Commuter
I commute using buses on daily basis. When the bus stops, it's quite often that I see a passenger who doesn't intend to alight but stands near the exit, blocking everyone else who wanted to get out of the bus. It's really really annoying, especially if you are the one who's being blocked. It slows down everyone
Even more annoying is when the said person is fat, or at least bigger than 50% width of the exit. Come on lady, some of us need to pass through here! >:(
Story 2: Awkward
Awkward moments can come anytime.
Yesterday our team was having RNA isolation kit suppliers demoing their reagents at our lab (for those who are unfamiliar with lab, omit the words 'RNA isolation'). Our lab already use another brand of RNA isolation kit, so to benchmark their kit, they asked us to use our kits in parallel to theirs, isolating RNA from the same samples. We don't have any problems with that, so ok, let's isolate the RNAs together.
Fast forward 1.5 hours, and our work was done.
The next step was to count our RNA concentration using Nano Drop (higher concentration means the kit works better). At this point, I realize something. What if our kit works better than their kit? Wouldn't it be weird for us? Because I don't mind if their kit works better than ours, that's the whole point of doing these comparison anyway.
As I thinking of that, the results came out. As I feared, our result were better than theirs.
If you're having problems grasping why this situation is problematic, imagine this. The suppliers came to our lab to give demo of their kit. They're trying do impress us, so at the end of the day they can say: "See, our kit works better than yours. Why don't we move over there and negotiate the price?"
But when that goal is not fulfilled, everyone feels weird. They feel weird because they cannot boast about their kit, and we feel weird because we kinda feel sorry for them. Yep, awkward indeed.
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