Speculation is more important than knowledge.

As mentioned a few posts back, I kinda watched part of 'The Bucket List' some time last month or something. I didn't watch the whole movie, but since it's a movie I can only assume it went like so: both Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson did crazy stuff for an hour or so before finding out from their embarrassed oncologists that thanks to a mix-up down in the lab, they both just had the flu.

Everyone who watches TV knows that this kind of mix-up in 'the lab' is a common occurrence in hospitals, but it's never explained. And despite being intimately familiar with labs, lab equipment, lab workers, and lab work, I've never worked in a hospital lab itself, so I will now speculate wildly about them.

The high rate of error for lab work is undeniably tied to the fact that, regardless of where one is at the time, tests are never being done "up in" the lab--samples are, without exception, sent "down to" the lab, which puts it somewhere between the basement and the abode of Hades. I imagine 'the lab' as the hospital equivalent of a dungeon, and I can't imagine any skilled person performing sufficiently precise work in such damp, poorly lit conditions, let alone the disfigured ogre types you usually find down there. On top of that, the only equipment I've ever seen in dungeons is made of wood and metal spikes and looks like it's made mainly for stretching people out or breaking their bones (which would be pretty counter-productive to the focus of the work going on upstairs). I just can't imagine the wooden, pirate ship wheel crank-operated centrifuge working as well as your basic automatic model.