Lab Technician Loses Count of Nematodes at 14,000, Starts Over

Laboratory technician Sandra Petridish was forced to restart a nematode population count from zero on Wednesday after losing her place at specimen number 14,247 due to what she described as 'an involuntary nasal event.' Petridish, who had been counting free-living nematodes extracted from a soil sample collected in the Fens, was approximately eleven hours into the process when a sneeze caused her to look away from the microscope for 'no more than two seconds.' 'Two seconds is all it takes,' Petridish said, staring at the Petri dish with an expression colleagues described as 'haunted.' 'They move. That is the fundamental problem with counting nematodes. They are alive and they move. You look away and everything shifts. Was I on that cluster or the one next to it? There is no way to know. You have to start again.' Dr. Nema Roundworm, principal investigator on the study, confirmed that restarting was the correct protocol. 'The count must be continuous and uninterrupted,' she said. 'A broken count is a contaminated count. Sandra knows this. Her sneeze has cost us a day of work and approximately forty milliliters of mounting medium.' Petridish has since taped a surgical mask to her face and placed a sign on the laboratory door reading 'COUNTING IN PROGRESS — NO POLLEN, NO PERFUME, NO SUDDEN MOVEMENTS.' A colleague who entered to retrieve a stapler was asked to leave immediately. The recount began at 6 AM Thursday. At the time of publication, Petridish had reached specimen 3,412 and reported conditions as 'stable but tense.'