You'll Go Blind

"Trevor, your Blind QCs are getting really out of control..." Aimee said to me earlier this morning.

"How so?" i inquired.

"'Richard Burns?'" she replied. "With the mother, 'Aretha Burns!'"

I was a little disappointed in Greg, who had to have the names explained to him.

Perhaps i should step back a moment and explain what's going on here. In the laboratory where i work, we deal with blood samples on babies from across the state of Wisconsin, as well as another state and three foreign countries. In order to test both our instruments and our chemists for accuracy, a couple times a week we slip fake samples into the mix. These are called Blind Quality Controls, or Blind QCs. To help ensure the desired result, the chemists aren't supposed to know which samples are fake. But these samples, of course, don't come straight out of thin air. Somebody has to make them.

The blood samples are created by one of our chemists using donated blood, which is then spiked with disease. Somebody else needs to make up fake demographics for this sample, including of course the baby's name and the mother's name. This leaves room for a lot of creative license. In the past, some people assigned this task have simply rifled through the phone book, but that's no fun. I take this task far too seriously for that.

My first experience with these Blind QCs came a couple months after i started working at this lab, back in 2006. I had come across a sample on a baby Ra's al Ghul, which struck me funny, and i had to share. So i took it to Eric, who's kind of a Batman dork (though to a lesser extent than myself). Eric was unfazed, though, and recognized it immediately for what it was. His boss, Tom (who is in charge of the Blind QC program), was disappointed in me for ruining it, and decided to punish me by assigning me to make more.

My first batch of names was pretty boring, but after a little inspirational talk from Mike, i started to bring a certain flavor to my Blind QCs.

Paraphrased: "Porn names! You've got to use porn names. Like Rusty Palm and Filthy Sanchez and Hugh G. Rection.

"Otherwise if you want to insult somebody's taste in music, like Robert's for example, you would do something like suggest that Ian Curtis from Joy Division is the son of Patsy Cline or something."

I ended up doing far worse to Joy Division as a Blind QC, even though i kind of like them. Mother: Joye Division. Baby: Gary Glitter.

I certainly didn't take Mike's advice lightly. This sort of thing panders directly to a sense of sophomoric, juvenile humor which i will never apologize for.

The real kicker is that when a chemist discovers a Blind QC, they've got to bring it up to the director of our laboratory. More from Mike: "It always sucks when you've got to bring a sample up to him with a name like John Holmes and you're standing there, trying hard not to laugh, and just waiting for him to get it, but he never gets it."

I've been responsible for quite a few of those uncomfortable moments, and since i'm not a chemist myself, i'm never the red-faced sucker standing in the director's office. Some of the better ones from my tenure have included Gloria Hole, Mony Schott, Arja Stillsmoking-Kraak, Kathy Stillsmoking-DeRoche (Kathy is a coworker), and Padme Rose Johnson, daughter of Bobbie Lopez, which to outsiders means nothing but inside the lab is a very thinly-veiled reference to Robert procreating with a certain co-worker that everybody despises, for a variety of very good reasons. Tom had removed Kraak from Arja Stillsmoking, but i'm still shocked that i got away with Gloria Hole. I thought that Mike and Eric were going to lose their shit laughing at that one.

Probably my favorite incident, though, was the one that didn't get taken care of properly. There is another agency which we collect some information on behalf of, and when we do Blind QCs they are supposed to get removed from the queue of specimens which get reported to that agency. Well, one day, one didn't get removed from the queue, and a report went out. There was much confusion around the lab that day as people on our end, their end, and the end of the hospital this baby was allegedly born at. This probably could have been solved right away, but of course, i was not in that day.

I came to work the next day, and as soon as my boss sees me, she stops me in my tracks and says, "Are you responsible for baby Boo Ger?"

Aimee was telling me today that she had been the one to deal with the other agency on that case. "The lady on the other end of the phone was so professional about it. She just said, 'we need some information on baby Boo Ger." This part of the story really needs Aimee's verbal inflections to be funny. But trust me, it was.

Really, though, i just wish i'd been able to see the look on Greg's face when Aimee said, "Dick Burns? Urethra Burns?"