Does this sound familiar?
You are the supervisor of a regional hospital, and local hospitals send you FFPE blocks for IHC testing. Not only are the daily block counts increasing but the blocks received have less and less tissue. You are in a panic because Becky, your fastest microtomist, was recently diagnosed with Repetitive Motion Disorder (RMD).
Today, the courier arrived late with 50 more blocks than expected, forcing you to work the bench to help get the work done. It is hard to focus, because all you can think of is how much overtime the lab has already accumulated this month and how the pathologists are going to call upset because their slides will be late again. There is no way to get these slides out faster because of a second bottleneck created by your IHC stainers that force you to wait until the current runs complete before adding any more slides, even though the slide trays (for the Leica Bond) are not full.