Being Stubborn

Today my coworkers got a glimpse of my "strong,stubborn,bulldog"side!! One of the reference labs called us today and told us that one of our samples was qns-- that means in lab terms quanity not sufficient. It was a complicated grouping of tests done on a teenage girl last week. The processing of the blood was done by Lisa who is by the way a very exacting tech and extremely careful in all areas of processing. First of all, as background let me explain that before we drew this girls blood we got the manual out and made sure of each test and the quantity required. There was a total of 27ml of blood drawn, with a hematocrit of 36 we could figure out that was a minimum of 9 ml of serum sent to the lab. This was way more than the quantity required in the manual of the reference lab. So when the lab called I simply said I did not buy that there was not enough serum--perhaps they had lost one of the three tubes. She then started some story that they had ben bought out by another lab and the book was no longer accurate-also the methods are changing and now they need more serun. I told her that she did not convince me because new methods are doing the same test with less blood not more. We will not accept this as an explanation. She said do you want to talk to my supervisor and I said "yes" I then went and got Our supervisor and let them duke it out--guess what-- we got a call at 3 o'clock and our lab tests were being done !!!!Then our Sup. put in a complaint on their lab--we think the tube was in another dept. and the person was too lazy to get it and just marked it qns!! Lisa said --I never want you to get mad at me I want to stay on your good side--I hope I wasn't that bad but I can not stand it when they try to pass off some contrived story instead of the truth. If they had simply said I'm sorry we dropped a tube or lost the sample I would have accepted it. So sometimes it pays to be stubborn!!!