text: Up until a few days ago I was steadily employed as a laboratory technician at one of the cancer hospitals in my city. Now, for those of you not in the know, lab techs get paid jack shit even after getting a science degree. If you ever spend any time on r/labrats then you’d know what I mean. Even worse, the pay scales in academia are a joke compared to industry. Luckily for me I somehow worked my way into a decent paying lab tech job in one of the research groups at the hospital. My boss (whose name I can’t say, I’ll explain later) was probably the most successful and well-funded researcher in the entire research division. Our group would crank out several publications in a single year in Nature, Cell, New England Journal of Medicine you name it. (Not bragging but I made co-author on one of the papers!). My job as a lab tech was actually pretty easy. A lot of it was the usual lab stuff that no one here would care about but where I really excelled was apparently my ability to grow tumours. I never understood how I did it but my boss and some of the other post docs would grow tumours on me and somehow I could grow them faster than the other techs. The solid tumours were the easiest like melanoma and lung cancer, even some of the rarer ones like bone cancers. I would consider those an easy project. For obvious reasons I absolutely drew the line at testicular cancer. My boss and I had a long discussion about it but even he knew I wasn’t budging on that one. The worst was leukaemia. I hated it and so did the other techs. If you’ve ever had a bone marrow biopsy you’d know what I was talking about. That hurt like a son of a bitch! So as a rule you’d only have to do a leukaemia project once a year. Anyway, after they, or I should say I, had grown the tumour my boss or some of the other post docs would then either excise the tumour or give me a drug to try and reduce it in size. From this we would get some of the most amazing and ground-breaking data in the field. My boss would give these talks at conferences and I’m not kidding, other prominent researchers would lose their shit! But here’s what happened and this is how I lost my job. Goddam OHS. Two weeks ago some OHS representatives came to give a talk to our lab. Turns out, my boss hadn’t been filling out the proper paperwork to be working on human subjects. The ethics committee were losing their minds and we had to stop research on humans immediately. They were however allowed to continue their research but only using mice. And that’s how I lost my job to goddam mouse! Me and the other lab techs were pretty much sent packing that day. We had to sign an NDA, which is why I can’t mention my boss’ name. I’ve tried contacting the other techs to see how they’re going but it seems like they’ve all ghosted me and I can’t get in touch with any of them. I’ve started looking for other work in the meantime. We got a decent payout which should keep me afloat while I look for another job. But I am *definitely* moving into industry.