Describe your experiments - NAG, NAG, NAG... - (Jul/05/2006 )
What I cannot abide are questions that cannot be answered and are unnecessarily vague (I also can't stand bad spelling and incorrect punctuation, but those I'll forgive given the diverse nationalities using the forums).
I want to help but some consideration needs to be put in by the poster. If you simply state that your experiment didn't work how on earth can I tell you where it went wrong. Maybe you didn't turn the machine wrong, maybe the cleaner doesn't like you and sabotaged your work or perhaps it just doesn't work for five days following the New Moon.
Without details no truly useful answer can be given. This, surely, must be apparent to the poster with the problem.
You might have guessed that I'm a supervisor for undergrads and it's mainly from having to mark their ambiguous, non-descript ramblings that this irritation derives.
What I can’t abide are PIs who’d continuously accept students and leave them to flounder and fend for themselves. A well-organized lab with a conscientious PI wouldn’t have students who can’t even find nor follow protocols. Of course there’s no need to rediscover the wheel since everything in research is limited- funding, time, effort, samples, sanity…
. As for fine tuning and troubleshooting, the more experienced lab personnel should be there to help out.You have a valid point Doc Martin regarding the way some forumers ask for help but lighten up on the spelling and grammar dig because most of us don’t speak (and write) the queen’s English like you do. Besides most non-native English speakers wouldn’t have the inclination to ask someone else to proof read a personal post. You are already doing a lot of good just by participating in this forum, how about more brownie points for a little more patience
?Mic
In my opinion you can't really blame someone for asking a question. After all: how did they get to this forum? Probably searched for it on google and thought it was an easy place to get an answer to their question (if the PI doesn't help them too much, they most likely had to search google to find this forum). So answering a question from a beginner, I don't have a problem with.
But people who just say "my PCR didn't work this time, but last time it did, what's wrong?" are sort of annoying. But you can ignore them, or otherwise advise them to explain their problem better, or just to search this forum (others have had similar experiences maybe). You can on the other hand not expect all people to know every detail about a reaction (influence of Mg, annealing temp, how often the dNTP's have been thawed etc in the case of PCR) if the PI doesn't help too much, so I forgive them for that.