The line I write each time a vial leaves the freezer

For a long time my records stopped at the freezer door. I knew what had arrived, when, from whom and where it had been put. What happened after that was a matter of memory. A vial of lyophilised peptide went out, came back, went out again, and the logbook knew nothing about any of it.

Then one morning I found a vial on the bench. It was at room temperature, dry on the outside, with the cap on. Nobody remembered leaving it there. It could have been out for twenty minutes or since the previous afternoon, and there was no way of telling which.

That vial is the reason there is now a sheet of paper taped to the freezer.

One sheet, six columns

It is an ordinary A4 page in a plastic sleeve, ruled by hand the first time and photocopied ever since. Each outing of a vial gets one line. The columns are:

• date;
• running number of the vial, the same one that is on its cap;
• time out;
• time back, or the word “finished”;
• initials;
• a narrow column for remarks.

That is all. I tried a version with nine columns, including the purpose of the outing and the room it was going to. It lasted a week. People filled in the first three boxes and left the rest blank, which is worse than not having the boxes, because a half-empty form teaches everybody that the form is optional.

The running number does the heavy lifting. I don’t ask anyone to copy the compound name or the batch number onto the door sheet. Those are in the logbook under the same number, written once, carefully, on the day the parcel was opened. Copying a batch number with a cold hand is how a 0 turns into a 6.

Why paper, and why on the door

I do keep the main records in a spreadsheet. The sign-out sheet is paper because the moment of taking a vial out is the worst possible moment to ask someone to walk to a computer. Gloves on, box open, cold air pouring out. If writing the line takes more than ten seconds, it will be done “later”, and later is the first step towards the vial on the bench.

So the sheet is at eye level, on the outside of the door, and the pen hangs next to it on a string. I have mentioned the string before. It remains the most effective piece of quality assurance I own.

On Friday afternoon I take the sheet down, type its lines into the spreadsheet and put up a fresh one. The old sheet goes into a ring binder. Typing takes a few minutes and brings a small bonus: I read every line, and anything odd gets noticed within the week instead of within the year.

The column people skip

“Time back” is the one that gets forgotten. Taking something out feels like an event. Putting it back feels like tidying up, and nobody records tidying up.

My fix was to change what an empty box means. An open line, with a time out and nothing after it, is a question addressed to the person whose initials are on it. On Friday I ask it. Not as a reproach. I simply need to know whether the vial is back in its place, used up or sitting somewhere I should go and look. After a month of Friday questions the empty boxes became rare.

When a vial is finished, the line says so, and the empty vial doesn’t go back into the box. Its position on the freezer map is crossed out the same day. Otherwise the map goes on promising a vial that no longer exists.

What the sheet is for

I had one use in mind when I started: knowing how long a vial had spent out of the cold. The sheet does that. If a result looks strange, I can look up the vial’s history and see whether it had been out five times for a few minutes or once for a whole afternoon.

It turned out to do two other things.

It tells me which vials are in use. A box in the freezer gives no hint of which of its twelve vials has been opened and which are still untouched. The binder does. When I plan an order, I leaf through the last two months and see what is being used up and what hasn’t moved since it arrived.

And it ties a vial to a day. Anyone who looks at an experiment later and asks which material was used can be answered from two documents: the experiment’s own record, which cites the running number, and the door sheet, which shows that this number left the freezer that morning. PEPTIDÁE has an article on laboratory quality control for research peptides, written in Romanian, that looks at the same chain from the supplier’s end. Mine is the last link, the short one between the shelf and the bench.

Names on the sheet

One rule about names. If someone does add the compound in the remarks column, it has to be the name exactly as it stands in the logbook, and the logbook uses the name from the supplier’s documents. A blend is the usual trap. A product such as the CJC + Ipamorelin entry in their catalogue is one vial with two components, and on a door sheet it tends to shrink to whichever half the writer remembers. Two weeks later that half-name looks like a different product. So: the full name or, better, only the number.

The vial on the bench

It was never used. With no time out and no initials, I could say nothing about how it had been kept, and “probably fine” is not an entry I make. It has its line in the logbook, with a note, and a place in the box with the red lid.

The first sign-out sheet went up that same afternoon, ruled with a pencil and a metal ruler. I still have it in the binder. The first line on it is in my handwriting, and the “time back” box is empty.