People in the Lab

There are two groups of people in the lab. There's the clinical laboratory scientists (CLS). They do all of the tests on the blood and put it in the machines. They're generally a pretty introverted group. They usually have a bachelor's degree in CLS, although some of them are lab technicians, in between phlebotomists and CLSs for training.
Then there are the phlebotomists. I mostly spend my time with them. There are three shifts: a.m. (4:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.), p.m. (12:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.), night (8:30 p.m. to 4:30 a.m.). I work with the a.m. shift on Saturday mornings. There are career phlebotomists, and there are people who are phlebotomists while they go to school, or to get 1000 hours or so of patient interaction time for graduate school.
I spend most of my time with:

• a former teacher in Afghanistan who immigrated in 1993. Her husband works in another part of the hospital, watching patient's vitals. 
• a woman whose son is a genius with machines and is going to the best diesel mechanic school in the country.
• another woman who is Filipino and whose son is on the football team at his high school
• a last woman who's Creationist and conservative (honestly can't think of anything else that I know about her, probably because she is so hardworking that I haven't tried to interrupt her for a long conversation)

I've been volunteering for a year, around 130 hours. I've learned some interesting things. Phlebotomists don't like wet dark green LACTV tubes which have to be kept on ice, but the labels peel off if they get too wet, so they prefer if the tubes are in a glove or the outer pocket of the biohazard bag, with the ice in a separate compartment. They also don't like leaky specimens, like urines for example (sort of obvious), and they can't do tests on tubes from the ER that come in without a time that the blood was collected. They also dislike unnecessary blood cultures (Bactens), which are cultures where bacteria/fungi in the blood can grow so that they can be identified, but anyways, they take a lot of processing. They're not being lazy; they're just buried in work and need to get on to the next specimen. On the other hand, they don't mind unnecessary blood. Actually, extra blood lets them add on extra tests to the same set of vials instead of having to stick (draw blood from) the person again. Speaking of sticking, one time they told me that they love when doctors let them stick someplace other than the arm when someone's a hard stick. Hard sticks are when the vessels in someone's arm are hard to get blood out of because they've had so many IVs and blood drawn from veins. Other possible places to draw blood are the wrist, the legs, and sometimes the neck.

http://ascendreferencemanual.com/ref/images/stories/large/bactec-culture-bottles.jpg

Bacten: aerobic and anaerobic. Blood goes in the bottle. Bottle goes in a machine for 2-10 days. If bacteria or fungi start growing, there's something wrong with you.