My job as a lab technician

I've been asked countless times what I do for a living. And almost every time, I hesitate to answer that question. Because I know if I explain what I do, I'll either get polite smiles or blank stares or sometimes horrified looks. It's so much easier to tell people you're a lawyer or a doctor or a nurse or a pilot or a secretary or a teacher... anything but a lab technician. I'm pretty sure even my own family have absolutely no clue what I do at work.

...maybe I'll try explaining what I do here!

I am a lab technician, who currently work for a medical school research lab. My bosses are neurologists, who are interested in figuring out the mechanisms for stroke, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's... They usually figure out experiments to achieve that goal, and vaguely explain (by that I mean bump into me in the hallway and proceeding to tell me about the dream they had last night about the latest experiment...) to me what they want to do. Then here I come into the picture, with my measly Bachelor's degree in science (trust me, just a Bachelor's isn't quite enough to understand what they're talking about. Biochemistry and molecular biology is an immensely huge field), trying my utmost best to understand their instructions (that usually just go 'whoosh' over my head most of the time anyway...) and then write up an experiment proposal so I can verify in writing that that is indeed what they want to do. Then I email it to my bosses and wait for their criticisms to my stupidity and editing they wish to make. After that I get to proceed to the exciting part of the job: the wet lab experiment!

This is where I get to:

• play with tissues, i.e. little rat brains, kidneys, spleen, heart, uterus, ovaries (teeny tiny little things) (I used to work with even more disgusting stuff, like feces, blood, urine, vaginal oozations, semen, cow's milk... hey that's what gloves are for!)
  
• weigh out cool chemicals, (actually not as cool-looking as Hollywood make them out to be, most chemicals are just white powder or granules. Applies to liquids too, most of which are just plain colorless, not the rainbow assorted colorful liquids that they usually show typical scientists on TV working on. That's probably just food coloring.)
• use cool glasswares like Erlenmeyer flasks, graduated cylinders, beakers...
• use pipettors like these that take up minuscule volumes like 0.1ul (that's microliter for you non-science real world people out there)
  
• make little proteins, RNA or DNA material
• mess with the little proteins, RNA or DNA material, meaning I get to bind them antibodies or primers and then... oh forget it there's too much to get into there
• inhale noxious (and sometimes intoxicating) fumes from formaldehyde, xylene, isopropanol (which is NOT the same as 1-propanol, stupid chemistry stores people), ethanol (200 proof or 190 proof, although you can technically only drink the 190 proof ones because the 200 proof ones contain icky stuff like benzenes and such), methanol, and my absolute favorite: Beta-mercaptoethanol! The smell reminds me of something stir-fry, although most people in the scientific community will think I'm absolutely nuts because it is possibly one of the most foul-smelling chemical you can use in protein biochemistry experiments...
• use chemicals that can potentially: poison me, cause cancer, cause infertility, blindness... I'm really making my job sound undesirable aren't I?
  

Other fun things I get to do as a lab technician in a medical school:

• access to the human gross anatomy cadaver lab. Why I consider that fun, I don't know. I think I just say that for its shock value. But I've been dragged kickin' and screamin' down to the cadaver lab before to sort through old moldy specimens of human tissues, i.e. liver with tumor, eyeballs (yes they stare right back at ya), uterus with a little fetus floating in it, brains... never had to mess with the cadavers. Yet.
  
• access to microscopes and seeing some of the coolest cellular images ever.
• go through scientific catalogs and pick through what I need for the lab (and drool over luxury items that I really want but too unreasonably expensive to get)
• organize my lab the way I want it to be like (neat and tidy, thank you very much. We recently moved to a new building, so I have a nice new empty lab to move into. It was every neat-freak's dream come true!)
• boss students around who come in to do their research

Even that doesn't cover everything that I do in the lab. But hopefully if someone else asks my family or my friends what is it that I do in the United States, they won't go... uhh, something in science? Biotechnology? Hopefully they can rave on and on about all the cool and fun stuff I get to work on at my job. (Yeah dream on dear, not everyone loves science-y stuff as much as you do, dorky geek).

Questions, anyone?