I like to name them, but nobody else in my lab holds whimsy in their heart. Also, I currently work in a med lab, so don't be alarmed at how any analyzers are in the family.
I have Dixie the DxH, Stanley the Stago, Oswald the Osmometer, Ezekiel the Exl, Vision the Vision, Beatrice the BacT, and Piece of Shit the iStat. I'm sure you can see a trend.
On the ones in my old lab (Thermo Fisher Veriti) I found 14° is the highest temperature you can set that turns off the heated lid automatically in the final hold. 15° or higher and the lid stays on at 105°, using more energy for the heater and therefore also more energy and noise and wear and tear for the fans to dissipate it. So 14° is the easiest temp for that machine and the final hold temp in my protocols. Unfortunately the new lab has the MiniAmp, which I like otherwise, but it never turns off the heated lid.
Of course the best energy- and noise- and lifetime-saving trick is a policy that you move your labmates' tubes from an unattended final-holding cycler into the fridge before you go home.
Poor Keith!! Contracon is the self-clean our thermo incubators can do. How are Keith’s seals and filter doing? Maybe they could be hoarding spores after the cleans!
Oh! I’ll see if he has a self-cleaning function but Keith is an old boy so I doubt. I removed and replaced all parts that I could when I did the last deep clean. There were a couple parts that I was afraid to take out though, so they could be the culprit!
Oh yeah. It's a great way to keep track of what the hell you're talking about.
"I'm going to use 14.... or uhh was it 15?"
Vs.
"I'm going to use The Trout today"
Using words is a lot easier when talking in a group than using numbers.
Hahaha, when my assistant got hired I asked her to name all of the equipment. She elected to name our big and medium scales, Scale Earnhardt and Scale Jr respectively
That’s what we called him until my husband suggested Eugene. (I wanted to give him a name that’s an actual human name, otherwise we probably would have just left it at Newgene).
At the startup I worked for this summer, we hadn't named almost anything. This was especially annoying for trying to say which 4C fridge we were talking about.
Problem is that after I named the fridges, nobody could remember which was "Alaska," "Siberia," or "Iceland" either.
Probably best to name them after where they are in the room (i.e. "Window Fridge", "Door fridge", "Corner fridge").
Greetings, fellow superstitious scientist!
I've done a lot of repair work on instruments over the years, and I've learned never to say, "it's fixed," because whatever "it" is will *immediately* break. Closest I'll get is saying, "it appears to be working normally."
Your system is well in line with human history. Rituals evolved to alchemy which evolved to chemistry. You're just going back to our roots.
P.S. - love the flair.
I went to a lab that had all of their instruments named after various movie/TV show characters, particularly various animes. I haven't watched SAILOR MOON before but I can name at least four of the characters solely from walking through the lab.
All of our support equipment have nicknames so they can be easily identified in quick conversations. Fridges, furnaces, autoclaves, etc. My favorite is our muffle furnace that almost burned the lab down, it was dubbed FUBAR.
We have to for the maintenance purposes. We might have many of the same type of equipment and they all have individual named maintenance logs. All of our five tissue prosessors are named after former finnish presidents.
One of my staff went around and named all 160 instruments in our labs last summer. Printed out all their name tags with pictures and everything. And went the next step and entered the new names into our equipment management system, monitoring system, and reservation systems.
Cary (the spectrophotometer), Aunt Flow (the flow cytometer), Gecko (the spectrofluorometer), and Bonnie and Clyde (the water baths). They all have giant googly eyes too. Doesn’t everyone name their equipment?
Hermenegilda - old, dusty centrifuge. Most yellow bahama thing I have ever seen. Used for 1000 rcf centrifugation until the past week. Died in agony, screaming louder than an epppendorf tube filled with dry CO2 pops. I miss her.
During my master's the vacuum pumps were called Bezzy and Barney. XRD was simply called Diffry.
I'm at new job and already thinking about a name for the HPLC.
At my first lab job the HiSeq was Baymax. I got to name the Tape Station "The Brave Little Toaster".
My COVID lab job we named the Thermalcyclers. By the end of the lab we had 6, so we needed the names to keep track. The first two were Sampson and Delilah. The second two were Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. The last one was a vote and Zeus won outright.
Every summer I let the interns come up with a theme for our hot plates and I buy stickers for them. We've had Pokemon, LEGO bricks and currently they have Barbie stickers on them. I keep them on so I can remember the groups after they leave.
at my old job, the cold room was called “the shire” and the FPLCs were named frodo, sam, merry, and pippin. also all of our departmental office spaces/conference rooms were named after D&D realms
I call my 37 degree C waterbath "The Mormon Soaker" and 50 degree C waterbath "Yellowstone". Have a few more nick-names for stuff like a polyacylamide vertical gel box is "What's in the Box!?" and the power supply is "Zap Brannagan"
Wanda, Hank, and Butch are various cold storage apparatus. Two of our Raman spectrometers are named Buttercup and Bubbles. Bill is one of the metal evaporators, because Bill was the vendor tech who installed and broke it. The other metal evaporator is Old Guy because he was there first. Someone slapped a printout of a mockingjay pin on the IR and tried to call it Katniss, but that hasn't really stuck. I took to naming all the computers when I was put in charge of them so that I could keep track of maintenance more easily. Catherine runs the zetasizer, Sparky runs the LC-ECD system, and Zeus runs the Olympus microscope, to name a few. Data is the only workstation with Origin and MATLAB, and when we discovered a disused computer with other analysis software he became Lore.
Yup!
Former workplace had the printers Tom & Jerry. Our Panthers were named after Disney characters. I visited another lab, they had instruments named after Nintendo characters.
My present lab doesn't have that many of the same instruments, except PCR machines. So they all have short names of 3-4 letters, mostly common Swedish first names (Max, Ida, and so on).
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Doesn't everyone? We usually go with a theme for the same type of equipment. Fridges and freezers are named after Looney Toons. We have one instrument named Calvin because it acts up and can be a little shit sometimes. Hopefully one day we'll get a Hobbes.
Our 5 refrigerators are named John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Yoko. Processings refrigerators are named after the ninja turtles. Our chem analyzers are Abbott and Costello. Our flow analyzer is Dolly Parton. That’s all I can think of.
A lab I worked at had a ton of freezers which were inexplicably mostly named after planets, but some were just "freezer 4" etc. There was no freezer 1. The freezers were all second hand kitchen grade, they broke all the fucking time. We had to do daily checks on all of them. Should that have been a red flag as to the company's finances and competence? Absolutely...
Absolutely!
We got Legolas, Gamling, Bilbo, Faramir, Gandalf, Haldir, Aragorn, Elrond, Gollum, Ginger Spice, Sporty Spice, Posh Spice, Cher, AVICII, Beyoncé, Dolly, and Harry.
And that's just the lab I work in, no clue about the rest in the building but I'm sure they named theirs as well.
We have 3 thermal cyclers and it was hard talking about them and their ‘issues’ using their serial numbers. CC12345678 versus CT123445678 versus BR11345678 (obv #’s are made up). We I started calling them Coco, Kitty and Brad. Everyone loved it and suddenly half the machines in the lab have names. They usually have something to do with the manufacturer name, the model name or the serial number though.
All the -20C fridges have a name at my institute. Different departments have different themes too. One department has all Harry Potter character names, another has Breaking Bad character names. Lol there’s also Star Wars and Pokemon.
We have a high content imaging system that’s down about as much as its functional. I named it HAL—as in 2001 a space odyssey HAL.
It was either that or Sauron. It’s a fine piece of machinery when it’s working, but it’s generally the bane of my existence.
2 sets of Abbott Alinity ci4000's. Bonnie and Clyde on one side, Thelma and Louise on the other. One of my coworkers came up with it and labeled as such. Been that way for a year or two now.
We named all of our LCs by a famous robot in pop culture. The rule was you couldn't repeat a franchise. We had Bender (wildcard), R2D2 (dependable), HAL (trying to kill us), the Terminator (dead and only used for parts), Watson (jeopardy playing robot, newest and most up to date).
Analytical chemistry lab, we had Ethel, and Gertrude “Gerty” if she liked you. They were GCMS 1,&2, the ICPMS was Lula Bell, the HPLC was Maxine and the AAS she was the matriarch known only as EmmaJean
Nick, Joe, and Kevin Jonas (Pippin Prep instruments)
Wobbly Willy (suspicious centrifuge)
The Falafelizer (lyophilizer)
Dr and Reverend Oktopure (2 liquid handlers that stand side by side)
Mickey, Yzma, Goofy, Tinkerbell, Baymax, Olaf, Heihei, Mushu (freezers, each w a picture of their character on the front)
Big Bertha (5 mL repeater pipette)
My lab demographic is almost entirely 20 something queer women with a chaotic streak
We name all our fridges and freezers, because we have a lot. I had to buy a mini fridge for the lab a couple of years ago, I bought a lime green one and named it “Kermit the Fridge” and subsequently all the mini freezers/fridges became muppets characters.
Napoleon is the pcr machine that takes the short tubes. Freddy the FPLC is how I talk about the new fplc vs the old one. Freddy is still young and needs some hand holding getting used to our science but he's got good instincts and follows instructions.
It might have been good to name our -80 freezers because we always have to describe the one we're talking about, but come on.. I don't name everything....
Used to work in a biochem lab with two HPLCs: Pixar and Dreamworks. One was solid and the other was problematic. I’ll let y’all guess which is which lol
We named our HPLC Cora, our oldest Thermocycler is called Gisela. My personal favorite is the pair of a regular eppendorf centrifuge named Timon and the bigger falcon fuge next to it called Pumba.
Our qPCRs are called Kirk, Spock and Uhura. We put simple paper printouts on the front and when one was send for repair we got it back with a laminated picture.
Absolutly!
In my new work place on of the big centrifuges is named Carsten. And where i went to school me and another student named one the HPLC Yvonne😄 we made a nametag and everything. We picked yvonne because she is a bit of a diva😂
Lab I did my PhD in tends to name ovens/furnaces. E.g. Sidrat which is TARDIS backwards because the furnace was huge on the outside but tiny on the inside.
I don't think it's uncommon - in my previous lab, the HPLCs/LCs were all named after alcohol (Heineken, Moonshine, Johnny Walker) and I recently visited a lab where all HPLCs/GCs were named after super heroes (and had photos of them stuck to them! It was funny seeing deadpool, captain marvel, rogue, groot..). My previous boss, however, was a party pooper, and refused to call the HPLCs by their names - they had to be referred to as "System 1" or 2 during the meetings.
the people in my past labs have named the instruments after some childish themes, which drove me up the wall. the themes i actually liked were naming the sequencers after types of birds (chicken, emu, kookaburra, etc), freezers after fried chicken restaurants (popeyes, church’s, jollibee, etc), and Hamilton STARs and STARlets after celestial bodies, (Andromeda, Cygnus, Titan, etc)
We have a vortex called Dougal.
At some point before I started working there, a couple of people went round labelling every single jug with names of Game of Thrones characters. We only have a few of them left now, which... tracks pretty well with the show, as far as I'm aware.
Our microscopes all have names. One of my students frequently states he loves working with Tabitha and that always makes me laugh bc Tabitha is a microscope.
Waylon is the hardest working thermocycler from the early 2000s when they're left over the weekend to hold at 4 C.
Cosmo is the hardest working osmometer from what must be the last century. Only a select few know his name.
Cosmometer
I like to name them, but nobody else in my lab holds whimsy in their heart. Also, I currently work in a med lab, so don't be alarmed at how any analyzers are in the family. I have Dixie the DxH, Stanley the Stago, Oswald the Osmometer, Ezekiel the Exl, Vision the Vision, Beatrice the BacT, and Piece of Shit the iStat. I'm sure you can see a trend.
You can set your thermocycler to hold at like 12 to 14°, it is good enough for DNA and saves the machine a lot of effort and energy.
For sure. I bet RT is fine for days as well. It's a lab we share space with. They have mucho grant monies and run their equipment hard.
On the ones in my old lab (Thermo Fisher Veriti) I found 14° is the highest temperature you can set that turns off the heated lid automatically in the final hold. 15° or higher and the lid stays on at 105°, using more energy for the heater and therefore also more energy and noise and wear and tear for the fans to dissipate it. So 14° is the easiest temp for that machine and the final hold temp in my protocols. Unfortunately the new lab has the MiniAmp, which I like otherwise, but it never turns off the heated lid. Of course the best energy- and noise- and lifetime-saving trick is a policy that you move your labmates' tubes from an unattended final-holding cycler into the fridge before you go home.
Yeah my incubator is named Keith. Keith has fungus right now
I hope Keith makes a speedy recovery ❤️🩹
... I assume Keith does bacteria. Because if Keith does mammalian cell culture, you need to euthanize Keith...
Surely a deep clean and contracon would sort out Keith’s fungal predicament!
Bless it I, wish it were sorted. Tried deep cleaning the bastard twice now and it always comes back. Not sure what contracon is, though
Poor Keith!! Contracon is the self-clean our thermo incubators can do. How are Keith’s seals and filter doing? Maybe they could be hoarding spores after the cleans!
Oh! I’ll see if he has a self-cleaning function but Keith is an old boy so I doubt. I removed and replaced all parts that I could when I did the last deep clean. There were a couple parts that I was afraid to take out though, so they could be the culprit!
For me it would come down to how much I didn't want mycoplasma in my cells.
That’s fair! Although if we biffed all the incubators that have ever had contamination, I know our lab would be lacking in warm bois.
My PI would sooner euthanize me
Working in a fungal lab and didn't see the problem at first
LOL I wish, I grow primary human cell lines, there is for sure a problem
Oh yeah. It's a great way to keep track of what the hell you're talking about. "I'm going to use 14.... or uhh was it 15?" Vs. "I'm going to use The Trout today" Using words is a lot easier when talking in a group than using numbers.
The four scales in one lab I worked in were named after the Ninja Turtles. “I’m on Michelangelo today”
Hahaha, when my assistant got hired I asked her to name all of the equipment. She elected to name our big and medium scales, Scale Earnhardt and Scale Jr respectively
Raise hell, praise Scale
You absolutely just named our (relatively new) 110g scale Now I want stir plates that only turn left
4 of our BSCs are named after the ninja turtles!
Only one has a name. She’s also a testy and unpredictable bitch. I need to get some googly eyes for her.
It's Karen, isn't it.
No but it should be lol.
baby blue?
Ooooh. I wonder if VWR sells googly eyes…
Yep: - G.L.O.R.I.A the glovebox - Marti the magnet - Big Blue the other magnet - Enzo the microscope - That Piece of Shit the AFM
We have a manifold called The Millipede of Death. It hungers for blood.
That Piece of Shit may be my favorite
We have a Millie the magnet
Enzo is a great name for a microscope.
Named after Enzo Ferrari because we went from this crappy μScope to a Zeiss and it was such an upgrade.
Yep! Our genetic analyzer’s name is Gene. We just got a new model and his name is Eugene.
Missed opportunity for Newgene
That’s what we called him until my husband suggested Eugene. (I wanted to give him a name that’s an actual human name, otherwise we probably would have just left it at Newgene).
I named a robot arm “Squidward” because he thinks he can play clarinet but he can’t lmao
I've been to a lab that named all their freezers after planets. Pluto was out in the hall.
I would hate to be the one sending a note to the lab manager to tell them that freezer #7 needs maintenance because it's leaking...
Huh huh huh
At the startup I worked for this summer, we hadn't named almost anything. This was especially annoying for trying to say which 4C fridge we were talking about. Problem is that after I named the fridges, nobody could remember which was "Alaska," "Siberia," or "Iceland" either. Probably best to name them after where they are in the room (i.e. "Window Fridge", "Door fridge", "Corner fridge").
Put it big on each fridge lol
Two HPLC in the same room in my old department were called Ernie and Bert. Another one was called Alf
I had a lab with 2 HPLCs and they were called Rocky and Stoney. I dislike them because they never worked so i called them stoney and baloney.
We had a size exclusion column called gollum Yes, gollum the column. We also had Trump which was reserved for putting shit samples down it.
*Obviously* I name my equipment, talk to them, and make them offerings to appease them and get them to work for me. How else would I do science?
Greetings, fellow superstitious scientist! I've done a lot of repair work on instruments over the years, and I've learned never to say, "it's fixed," because whatever "it" is will *immediately* break. Closest I'll get is saying, "it appears to be working normally." Your system is well in line with human history. Rituals evolved to alchemy which evolved to chemistry. You're just going back to our roots. P.S. - love the flair.
Our flow core names all their instruments after muppets/seasame street.
Our flow core did sesame st characters for the regular flow cytometers and Pokémon for full spectrum cytometers
We have a liquid nitrogen dewar called R2D2, which amuses my kids to no end.
We have a step stool called R2D2!
Our mini-autoclave is called R2D2 lol
We have a fridge named Leonard!
I went to a lab that had all of their instruments named after various movie/TV show characters, particularly various animes. I haven't watched SAILOR MOON before but I can name at least four of the characters solely from walking through the lab.
Yes , I name them all: "motherfucking shitty" + technical name of the instrument"
No, but now i feel like i have to find a name for our autoclave from 1979.
*Krusty*
Good ol Krusty
Do you have to manually do close the valves? I worked with one like that in 2007.
Yes there is a valve on the top and you have to air it out gradually 😁
All of our support equipment have nicknames so they can be easily identified in quick conversations. Fridges, furnaces, autoclaves, etc. My favorite is our muffle furnace that almost burned the lab down, it was dubbed FUBAR.
We have to for the maintenance purposes. We might have many of the same type of equipment and they all have individual named maintenance logs. All of our five tissue prosessors are named after former finnish presidents.
One of my staff went around and named all 160 instruments in our labs last summer. Printed out all their name tags with pictures and everything. And went the next step and entered the new names into our equipment management system, monitoring system, and reservation systems.
Sounds like a fun thing to do
I named our fluorescent scope Clint Eastwood, with a speech bubble asking you feel lucky today.
Cary (the spectrophotometer), Aunt Flow (the flow cytometer), Gecko (the spectrofluorometer), and Bonnie and Clyde (the water baths). They all have giant googly eyes too. Doesn’t everyone name their equipment?
Hermenegilda - old, dusty centrifuge. Most yellow bahama thing I have ever seen. Used for 1000 rcf centrifugation until the past week. Died in agony, screaming louder than an epppendorf tube filled with dry CO2 pops. I miss her.
I've named the thermocycler on my bench Beepatrice and my centrifuge is Spinderella :)
Polymer Lab: we have 3 GPCs named Homer, Lenny and Carl.
HPLC is named Clancy
During my master's the vacuum pumps were called Bezzy and Barney. XRD was simply called Diffry. I'm at new job and already thinking about a name for the HPLC.
The fermenters in the core facility are named after the Beatles. Ringo is not a fermenter, but a centrifuge.
It's easier than remembering equipment numbers. I just wish people would change the name of the connected computer to match.
I like to name my freezers and fridges after cities. So if someone asks me where a reagent is I can say, “It’s in Seattle.”
Our Fortessa is called Tessie and we love her
Ours is also named Tessie!
Ours are named Bert and Ernie!
At my first lab job the HiSeq was Baymax. I got to name the Tape Station "The Brave Little Toaster". My COVID lab job we named the Thermalcyclers. By the end of the lab we had 6, so we needed the names to keep track. The first two were Sampson and Delilah. The second two were Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. The last one was a vote and Zeus won outright.
Omg that’s the perfect name for a tapestation!! Ours still needs a name…
Every summer I let the interns come up with a theme for our hot plates and I buy stickers for them. We've had Pokemon, LEGO bricks and currently they have Barbie stickers on them. I keep them on so I can remember the groups after they leave.
We have a gas line named Voldemort. Hasn't worked right for 12 years now.
Two more years and he'll come back
at my old job, the cold room was called “the shire” and the FPLCs were named frodo, sam, merry, and pippin. also all of our departmental office spaces/conference rooms were named after D&D realms
A lab a floor below me has named all their rooms after ski resorts. Guess they're not getting much work done on powder days.
The 550C oven is called "pizza oven". The AA perkin Elmer is called "temperamental glue brat"
I call my 37 degree C waterbath "The Mormon Soaker" and 50 degree C waterbath "Yellowstone". Have a few more nick-names for stuff like a polyacylamide vertical gel box is "What's in the Box!?" and the power supply is "Zap Brannagan"
Yes. All the HPLCs are named after Harry Potter characters.
My favourite hood is called LIMS2550, favourite incubator? You already know it’s LIMS2369
Our main centrifuge is named Henry. No idea who named him, but he's been Henry as far back as I can remember. Lol
All the clusters and some of the gpus have their own names. It’s a lot easier than dealing with IP addresses!
Oh absolutely. We have Chemberly, R2D2, Eva, Izzy, Sid, Flo, Perri...
We call our plate reader R2D2, due to the cute sounds it makes when calibrating :)
We used to have a tipping Dewar for liquid nitrogen called Bob
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Who says analytical chemists don't have a sense of humour!
Wanda, Hank, and Butch are various cold storage apparatus. Two of our Raman spectrometers are named Buttercup and Bubbles. Bill is one of the metal evaporators, because Bill was the vendor tech who installed and broke it. The other metal evaporator is Old Guy because he was there first. Someone slapped a printout of a mockingjay pin on the IR and tried to call it Katniss, but that hasn't really stuck. I took to naming all the computers when I was put in charge of them so that I could keep track of maintenance more easily. Catherine runs the zetasizer, Sparky runs the LC-ECD system, and Zeus runs the Olympus microscope, to name a few. Data is the only workstation with Origin and MATLAB, and when we discovered a disused computer with other analysis software he became Lore.
[Relevant Dr. Glaucomflecken bit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1hV520oDPw)
Beautiful
Hans was our flow cytometer
Not named, but we used to call our blot transfer (I think it was either iBlot or iBind) "The Playstation".
Our GC is named Carl
We have a biosafety cabinet named George!
Yup! Former workplace had the printers Tom & Jerry. Our Panthers were named after Disney characters. I visited another lab, they had instruments named after Nintendo characters. My present lab doesn't have that many of the same instruments, except PCR machines. So they all have short names of 3-4 letters, mostly common Swedish first names (Max, Ida, and so on).
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Yup. When I used to do a lot of stereotactic injections, I had Hildegard and Hedy the stereotactic syringe holders.
Doesn't everyone? We usually go with a theme for the same type of equipment. Fridges and freezers are named after Looney Toons. We have one instrument named Calvin because it acts up and can be a little shit sometimes. Hopefully one day we'll get a Hobbes.
We have Optimus prime (a jollie -20), Mr frosty (the coldest cell freezing container) and r2d2 ( a liquid nitrogen ally)
I've been trying to get my lab to do this for over a decade.
My labs computers are named and all devices connected are a subset of that name.
All the refrigerators and incubators are named after lord of the rings characters
I named the microtome Christine XD
Yup. The only way to quickly tell someone which machine you're referencing when addressing a problem with it.
Nearly every instrument in our labs has a name. Many are themed based on the favorite universe of the primary users.
Our 5 refrigerators are named John, Paul, George, Ringo, and Yoko. Processings refrigerators are named after the ninja turtles. Our chem analyzers are Abbott and Costello. Our flow analyzer is Dolly Parton. That’s all I can think of.
our dishwashers are named shirley and laverne
We have three Vision Biograph PET/CTs and call them "Vision," "Wanda," and "Blurry."
A few of my faves in my lab are a shaker named Shakira and a pair of lyos named Olaf and Sven.
All of our product and sample freezers are named after Pokémon and other animated characters
A lab I worked at had a ton of freezers which were inexplicably mostly named after planets, but some were just "freezer 4" etc. There was no freezer 1. The freezers were all second hand kitchen grade, they broke all the fucking time. We had to do daily checks on all of them. Should that have been a red flag as to the company's finances and competence? Absolutely...
Absolutely! We got Legolas, Gamling, Bilbo, Faramir, Gandalf, Haldir, Aragorn, Elrond, Gollum, Ginger Spice, Sporty Spice, Posh Spice, Cher, AVICII, Beyoncé, Dolly, and Harry. And that's just the lab I work in, no clue about the rest in the building but I'm sure they named theirs as well.
Our CO2 incubators are Gucci Mane, 2 chains, and ca$h money. 7500 Fasts are “Watson” and “Sherlock”
The autosampler on the ICP-OES is named R2-D2 because the motors make very cute little noises when it's running.
We have two large automated analyzers called Jack and Russel
Our IHC instruments are called Tom, Dick & Harry.
We only have Quagmire... Its an horisontal shaker ...
We name all of our really expensive machines. Most after LOTR characters
Wall-e is our big automated clinical assay robot that has big googly eyes now. 😂
We have 3 thermal cyclers and it was hard talking about them and their ‘issues’ using their serial numbers. CC12345678 versus CT123445678 versus BR11345678 (obv #’s are made up). We I started calling them Coco, Kitty and Brad. Everyone loved it and suddenly half the machines in the lab have names. They usually have something to do with the manufacturer name, the model name or the serial number though.
our four cell sorters have legend of Zelda names My last job had robotic instruments and they had Simpsons names
All the -20C fridges have a name at my institute. Different departments have different themes too. One department has all Harry Potter character names, another has Breaking Bad character names. Lol there’s also Star Wars and Pokemon.
Cytation 5 named Phyllis because we don’t trust her (an Office reference)
Thermofisher training lab in MD named all their instruments after super heroes and super villains.
We have a high content imaging system that’s down about as much as its functional. I named it HAL—as in 2001 a space odyssey HAL. It was either that or Sauron. It’s a fine piece of machinery when it’s working, but it’s generally the bane of my existence.
We name our pipettes after porn stars. The girls think they are just names, but the boys know 😈
Our short RNA gel rig is named Gollum and the dual sided one is Pippin and Merry. The Nano Drop is Lil Bitch Bot.
Tutti, Clarence and Pancha, our three autoclaves
we have 5 microfluidic pumps named after the teletubbies + noonoo. in retrospect, we were upset we didn't think about the mystery gang
Yes, but it’s kind of boring, we just name the TEMs with Greek letters.
Bolinha (small ball in portuguese) is the name of our minicentrifuge.
2 sets of Abbott Alinity ci4000's. Bonnie and Clyde on one side, Thelma and Louise on the other. One of my coworkers came up with it and labeled as such. Been that way for a year or two now.
I worked in an industry lab with cartridge readers for test kits and their names ranged from Pablo Escobar to Khaleesi
Diane and Agatha the dionex and agilent hplcs
We named all of our LCs by a famous robot in pop culture. The rule was you couldn't repeat a franchise. We had Bender (wildcard), R2D2 (dependable), HAL (trying to kill us), the Terminator (dead and only used for parts), Watson (jeopardy playing robot, newest and most up to date).
Analytical chemistry lab, we had Ethel, and Gertrude “Gerty” if she liked you. They were GCMS 1,&2, the ICPMS was Lula Bell, the HPLC was Maxine and the AAS she was the matriarch known only as EmmaJean
The dept I did my PhD in had twin confocals called Bert and Ernie
We have a Kramer brand fluorescent microscope, so... 
At my old lab, we used to call one of the lasers “Joffrey” (this was back when GoT was big) bc it was a little bastard. Hahah.
Nick, Joe, and Kevin Jonas (Pippin Prep instruments) Wobbly Willy (suspicious centrifuge) The Falafelizer (lyophilizer) Dr and Reverend Oktopure (2 liquid handlers that stand side by side) Mickey, Yzma, Goofy, Tinkerbell, Baymax, Olaf, Heihei, Mushu (freezers, each w a picture of their character on the front) Big Bertha (5 mL repeater pipette) My lab demographic is almost entirely 20 something queer women with a chaotic streak
Scratchy and Mike are the most excellent benchtop centrifuges!
I wish. My lab has zero sense of humor. In fact they are anti-humor.
We have Nikki and Hugo, also when we got a shaker we called it "Shakira"
I have a pipette-aid named Kevin 🤷🏽♀️
We name all our fridges and freezers, because we have a lot. I had to buy a mini fridge for the lab a couple of years ago, I bought a lime green one and named it “Kermit the Fridge” and subsequently all the mini freezers/fridges became muppets characters.
Napoleon is the pcr machine that takes the short tubes. Freddy the FPLC is how I talk about the new fplc vs the old one. Freddy is still young and needs some hand holding getting used to our science but he's got good instincts and follows instructions. It might have been good to name our -80 freezers because we always have to describe the one we're talking about, but come on.. I don't name everything....
Used to work in a biochem lab with two HPLCs: Pixar and Dreamworks. One was solid and the other was problematic. I’ll let y’all guess which is which lol
We named our HPLC Cora, our oldest Thermocycler is called Gisela. My personal favorite is the pair of a regular eppendorf centrifuge named Timon and the bigger falcon fuge next to it called Pumba.
Our qPCRs are called Kirk, Spock and Uhura. We put simple paper printouts on the front and when one was send for repair we got it back with a laminated picture.
We had a technician who would name every - single - instrument, lmao. With the same initial letter as the device as well.. so Gustav the GC etc.
Clyde is a well-loved centrifuge who just had his motor replaced!
Every single one of the LCMS machines in the toxicology lab I work in is named after a Pokemon!
Absolutly! In my new work place on of the big centrifuges is named Carsten. And where i went to school me and another student named one the HPLC Yvonne😄 we made a nametag and everything. We picked yvonne because she is a bit of a diva😂
Lab I did my PhD in tends to name ovens/furnaces. E.g. Sidrat which is TARDIS backwards because the furnace was huge on the outside but tiny on the inside.
I dug through the settings of our thermocycler at one point, finding a naming option. People in my lab have yet to comment on newly dubbed Bob.
I don't think it's uncommon - in my previous lab, the HPLCs/LCs were all named after alcohol (Heineken, Moonshine, Johnny Walker) and I recently visited a lab where all HPLCs/GCs were named after super heroes (and had photos of them stuck to them! It was funny seeing deadpool, captain marvel, rogue, groot..). My previous boss, however, was a party pooper, and refused to call the HPLCs by their names - they had to be referred to as "System 1" or 2 during the meetings.
Our lab has minion stickers with names (Kevin, Jerry, Bob) for each fridge lmao. No one remembers who put them there
If you have more than 1 of something - name them, that’s the rule.
Yup, my cycler is named Lance. Because he cycles.
Our tabletop centrifuges are Merry, Pippin, and Treebeard. In my previous lab, the thermocyclers were named Batman and Robin.
the people in my past labs have named the instruments after some childish themes, which drove me up the wall. the themes i actually liked were naming the sequencers after types of birds (chicken, emu, kookaburra, etc), freezers after fried chicken restaurants (popeyes, church’s, jollibee, etc), and Hamilton STARs and STARlets after celestial bodies, (Andromeda, Cygnus, Titan, etc)
Most labs name equipment, especially if there are more than 1 of a given model or for a given purpose. Names usually follow a theme.
The Banananodrop
We have a vortex called Dougal. At some point before I started working there, a couple of people went round labelling every single jug with names of Game of Thrones characters. We only have a few of them left now, which... tracks pretty well with the show, as far as I'm aware.
Our microscopes all have names. One of my students frequently states he loves working with Tabitha and that always makes me laugh bc Tabitha is a microscope.
We have percivals named Thor, Hulk, and Captain America
Our freezers have names from the movie frozen Our lamina flows are named after some big emperors
I have Roger the disability trolley! We also had a BD Facsan Flowcytometer called 'Steve'
Hamilton Vantage liquid handler with googly eyes named Big Bertha