Accuse me of mislabeling things, fine I’ll come up with a new system that requires 10x the effort for you to figure out what is what.
About 5 years ago had just started at a new biotech as a medicinal chemist. We didn’t have a compound management group so distributing compounds to the assay chemists feel to the chemists. Essentially I made compounds and then gave them to another scientist to test the compounds to see how effective they are. I would make the compounds, put them in a vial and slap a label on them with the identifier code and the chemical structure and then walk over and give the guy the samples.
One day I accidently mislabeled 2-3 compounds, which hey my bad I am not infallible, and it messed up the results. Instead of doing the normal thing and coming to talk to me about the mix up he decided that it was neccesarry to send an email to my boss and his boss saying how unprofessional the situation was and how this can’t happen, etc etc.
What the guy didn’t realize was that I had a great relationship with my boss and his boss who both forwarded me the email saying we know accidents happen but be careful this guy seems like a real butthead so just be extra careful.
Here is where the petty revenge happened. I decided to come up with a “foolproof” system that would protect me but also add about 2-3 hours to his workload.
What I ended up doing to no longer putting the identifer code or structure on the vial and instead only used barcodes vials. I would put each compound in a barcoded vial and then created an excel sheet that had what each barcode corresponded to which compound. This required him to scan each vial with a barcode reader and then go through the excel sheet to determine what it corresponded to requiring him to spend about 5-10 minutes determining what each compound was. I debuted this system on a set of 200 compounds and watching him ask in our company slack if anyone had a barcode reader made me giggle.
The best part was that he asked me if we could go back to the old system and I politely said no because my bosses were legitamatley stoked about the new system because it was easier for them to keep track of where everything was. We eventually hired a compound management group that made my system unnecessary but it was a glorious 3 months.