This morning I was headed out the door towards classes at my university when I realized I had forgotten to complete an assignment for my microbiology lab. I grabbed my environmental sampling kit and tried to remember the instructions. My professor had briefly explained what to do last week, so I figured I remembered it pretty well. I took my RODAC plate and squished it onto the bathroom counter. But what should I use my wet swab culture on?
Obviously, being a rancher, I went to the most obvious: the animals. I opened up the door to my rabbit's cage and swabbed his nose. Then on my way down to the gate I stopped at the barn and dashed in to our quarantined sheep. I rubbed their back ends with the swab. I concluded this sampling by attacking the two turkeys perched on the fence.
None of this would have been a big deal except that I read the instructions later and realized we were supposed to sample four of the same type of items, like four pens, or forks, or something. Oops. I wrote "Farm animals 1-4" on my lab notebook.
This was right before when my professor made her announcement. Over the last week she had been contacted by a news crew hoping to do a show on environmental sampling. So, she concluded "next week there will be a tv crew in lab with cameras talking to you about your samples and what you sampled to get your results."
I have this vision of holding up my agar plate and announcing that I sampled "Sheep butts."
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