Some Horrors of the Microbiology Lab

You may have heard the stories - rumors of the awful smell, the evil microscope, the slippery slides.
Or perhaps you've been spared such morbid tales. Either way, the truth about microbiology lab is stranger than any fiction.

Upon entering this lab, one is assaulted with a barrage of rules, restrictions, and protocols - as with any labs. But these are very different. Things like not bringing your cell phone with you beyond the lab benches or else it will be autoclaved, washing your hands every single time you do something, and handling spills with intensity. You begin to realize you are surrounded by dangerous things, and then it starts - the paranoia.

One of your first lab experiments is inevitably swabbing random items and growing a culture (culture being a fancy word for growing microorganisms in an extra-hospitable environment). This is to teach you the ubiquity of microorganisms - how they can be found anywhere.

That's one powerful magnifying glass.

And this is where it begins. As soon as you remove your plate from the incubator and find it engulfed in unidentifiable growth, you realize you have been living in an unseen world, surrounded by creatures. They have been crawling all over you and your food for years and years, making you sick, making you fart, giving yogurt that tart flavor and weird cheeses their toe jam smell. They played a part in the making of your beer, the rising of your bread - in short microbes are behind everything that sucks and everything that is awesome that has ever happened in the entire world.

And you know are aware of their presence. Not only that, but how easily they grow and how dangerous they possibly can be. Like E. coli, or Salmonella sonnei, nasty bugs that can take you down in hours, or days, bugs that can kill.

This guy will chew you up and spit you out (if he could chew and spit)

 You will never look at a bathroom - or a kitchen - the same way again, and the smell of agar will linger in your nostrils.