Yes, I am the kind of person to realize this sounds stupid, but color also serves me as an organization system.  I can quickly identify what I need even when my life is not the most organized (which, uh, it usually isn’t) and when I am in a hurry (which, uh, I usually am).  If I need to grab my P200, I don’t need to waste precious seconds picking up each pipet and reading the labels, I just grab the green one.  When looking through 81 tubes in the freezer box to find anti-MAP, I know it has a purple label, because all of my primary antibodies have purple labels, while secondaries have red labels.

Along with my desire to make everything technicolor, I also look for ways to simplify my life where ever possible.  Anyone who has ever PCR’d before is familiar with those teeny tiny tubes and how difficult they are to label.   You could use the numbers on the tubes themselves, but, oh yeah, they are cloudy-clear on a clear background in a font size that wouldn’t even register in a word processing program, which isn’t exactly ideal for legibility.  The lids are off limits as they get removed, and any writing on the parts of the tube that make contact with the block is susceptible to being rubbed off.  That leaves you with a space a few square millimeters; even using finest Sharpies with the most immaculate handwriting, writing more than a couple of letters introduces ambiguity.  So I applied my favorite lab tool – color – to the problem, and now labeling my PCR strips requires the fine motor skills of a toddler.  Assuming you can also scribble, you’ll never have to struggle with labeling them again!

The easiest way to avoid the scorn of the entire lab is to carefully check what everyone is currently using and just stick with one kind.  However, if that is not possible or, say, you already ordered polystyrene tubes for the lab when polypropylene is the preferred kind and no one can tell them apart, yikes.  Unsurprisingly, I learned this the hard way; a post-doc in the lab was horrified to open the centrifuge on maxipreps to find the conical bottomed tubes fractured and his samples all over the rotor.  It was a stupid mistake that I thought only I was capable of making, until a month later when a tech from a brand new lab stopped by to ask what kind of conical bottom tubes we used, and asked very specifically about maxipreps.  I laughed because I knew instantly what the problem was.  I explained how you could hold them up to the light to determine whether the plastic was clear or cloudy, but that’s hard to determine without the other kind of tube as a basis for comparison.  That’s when a hammer and the desire to destroy things comes in handy.