I keep finding things that should not be there.
It started with the test tube. I was cleaning up after a long day and I kept tapping it against the rack out of habit. The strangest thing happened. I still cannot explain it.
Then I forgot my timer. Left it running overnight because I got distracted arguing about buffer recipes. Came in the next morning and got the biggest fright. Something had changed.
I have been spending a lot of time at the bench recently. More than I probably should. Opening the same tools, following the same paths between protocols and references, reading safety data I have already read. I am starting to think the lab notices.
Yesterday I was sorting through codons with a student and she asked me to name them faster. Three letters at a time, no pausing. I got the first few. By the tenth I was guessing. By the fifteenth she was laughing. I want a rematch.
I also caught myself watching a sequence scroll through the gel reader and trying to spot the EcoRI site before the software did. I got it. Then I missed the BamHI and took it personally.
Someone in the corridor said a string of nucleotides and I repeated them back. They added one more. I matched it. They kept going. I do not want to talk about where it ended.
I think there are twelve of them
There is something else going on here. I have been doing this work long enough now that things are starting to look different. Warmer, maybe. I cannot put my finger on it.