Meet the DxC, we have two named Dixie and Dexter. I’m about to tell you a very convoluted story involving Dexter.
So for the last couple of months, both of them had been kind of acting up, Dixie moreso even though she’s the lead instrument, so Dexter has been doing the bulk of the work. That day, the maintenance guy came to fix them both up, and he was working on Dixie first.
Throughout the day, Dexter had been spitting out random samples without running them because he would error in the middle of a sample and no one knew that he had skipped them (they went through the probes and scanners and everything). 3 hours into my shift, the nurse calls asking for a STAT result sent in at like 6AM (we get 1 hour to do a stat test, it was now 10AM) so one of the chemistry techs starts looking for the sample. She recruits a couple of lab assistants and they’re ripping the lab apart looking for this sample.
11AM is when a whole batch of new collections come in. Dexter is already overworked. He is still erroring. The missing STAT is still missing and we think it wasn’t received.
Then the man who needs to change the water tanks for both instruments arrives suddenly. And he says it will take about 10 minutes tops. Dexter completely crashes at this point and now we have no chemistry analyzers online. And we’re like, okay, let’s just change the tank and get it out of the way since they’re already down.
The DxCs have a reserve tank that can run about 10 tests in emergencies and the reserve is used up trying to recover Dexter from the crash and Dixie is lying in pieces on the counter. The phone is now ringing because the nurses want to know where their test results are.
The water change goes poorly and the lab is suddenly starting to flood. I crawl behind the instruments and hold up all the electrical lines so nothing short circuits while getting slowly soaked with fancy water as the water guy tries to stop the spray.
The stat is still finally found. The new samples are piling up, and now we have to rerun a bunch of the morning’s work because they were never tested at all.
Welcome to the lab?
