Dismissive scientist leaving no room for juniors gets a taste of his own medicine

Being confident about your work is one thing, but not being mindful to incorporate someone else’s input out of sheer ego is never appreciated and often backfires. In a similar incident, one scientist chose to walk an arrogant path by not letting his colleagues critique his work. One of his assistants and a lab technician–who goes by u/Jacked-Cookies on Reddit–opened up about his superior’s demeanor, which ended up teaching the latter a life-long lesson.

“There’s this licensed scientist who is practically hated by everyone except our manager and a supervisor who handles lab safety; these two are the only reason he hasn’t been fired yet,” a lab technician started their post. “He makes a point of telling every lab tech he comes across that he’s a senior scientist with a license. According to him, work should only be done when he’s physically present and watching us,” they explained. The lab technician went on to call the expert “arrogant” and a constant troublemaker for his overt micromanaging of everything.

However, other senior experts in the lab are more inclusive in their approach and allow young minds to do the grinding. Up to this point, it is completely normal because many people remain vigilant during their job. The technician further claimed that many of their peers tried to keep their distance from the “arrogant” scientist due to his habit of nitpicking until that one day when things took a turn. “One day, I was scheduled to work with ‘arrogant’ and another scientist, ‘good guy.’ There were 2 tests that needed to be run,” the lab technician added.

These two tests required pipetting tips to be of the same size or else it won’t work. The technician added, “Recently, someone had accidentally loaded a set of tips with different sizes onto the machine. Fortunately, ‘good guy’ caught it before the machine started and prevented a crash.“ “When I started checking them…the arrogant senior did not like what I was doing. So, he stopped me and said, ‘What are you doing? You’re working under my license,’” the assistant wrote. Following this, the disgruntled scientist threw his junior under the bus for just doing his job professionally.

The assistant had the scientist further yelling at them, “If you set up the machine, then I would be the one double-checking your work. Since I’m the one setting it up, I don’t need you double-checking my work.” The technician elaborated that they had spotted some irregularities with the size of disposable pipettes. “I was going to replace one of the 50uL tip racks he had loaded because I noticed a few 300uL tips were mixed in.” Instead of doing anything else, the junior placed the tips back and walked away while giving the scientist the “biggest eye roll” possible. On the other hand, when the former extended the same courtesy to the other “good” senior present there, he felt appreciated and went ahead with the experiment. The lost-found peace was short-lived as something happened at the lab that they did not expect.

“About 10 minutes later, there was a loud crunch,” the post revealed, along with a loud “Oh shit!” remark from the “arrogant” scientist, who by then was panicking. The machine picked up the mixed tip rack, pushing it so far down that the tips snapped into pieces and caused the reagents to splash all over its deck. The misadventure led to almost 100 samples getting contaminated and at least two hours of work going to waste. “Arrogant got written up for the lost work and was yelled at by two supervisors. The other techs and I still refuse to assist him to this day,” the technician concluded the post, sparking reactions from online readers.

“Mark Twain, a master of language, once advised against arguing with an i**** because they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience every time,” commented u/AdditionalSky6030. u/Dertyhairy remarked, “I usually test the waters. I give a point or two and when they go completely in the other direction, I say, ‘Yeah, good point’ and just stop talking about it. Waste of breath. Can’t fix s*****.”