Freezer meltdown?

Cole in happier days.

Well, just as the day was winding down at work we realized one of our liquid nitrogen freezers was possibly failing. It had been acting weird for a day or two - not communicating with the electronic control box, showing the nitrogen level staying the same while it was actually being filled, etc. Then it actually showed the level as dropping, so we had to take action. Said action being to transfer all the samples into the new backup freezer which I had named "Dale" after Dale Gribble on King of the Hill. [Previously named freezers include "Abel," "Bill," and "Cole," but if we get another it's definitely "Hank." Then possibly "Boomhauer." :P] Dale was mostly empty, but some of the racks weren't secured since I'd been in the middle of a reorganization scheme the last few days - trying to split all duplicates evenly between Cole and Dale as a safeguard against exactly this type of event.

Naturally several boxes of samples fell out of their racks into the three feet of liquid nitrogen. My boss spilled "a liter" (admittedly an exaggeration, but it was at least half that) of nitrogen down the front of his pants while removing racks and fishing out boxes. Yes, gentlemen, that means he had -190ºC shorts! Not to mention the frostbite he got on his fingertips from reaching down into it without gloves. His wife (my other boss) kept up a running commentary . . . es un loco . . .

Eventually we got everything into Dale. We didn't see any actual leaks in Cole, but it was safer to move everything. We measured the level (sharpie on his arm, ha!) and turned everything off, so tomorrow we'll see if it was actually failing. Hopefully it was just an electrical short or wiring issue, because those freezers are pretty expensive. All in all it took us an extra hour to deal with this. Luckily neither freezer was full, so we had room to store everything in one. Thank God this didn't happen while he was out of town - there sure as hell wouldn't have been anybody else around to help me.