Just found out that other people ARE allowed to listen to their iPods here at work.

With headphones.

Fuckers.

I am irritated.

There’s an issue at work that keeps coming up, and even though I’m the only one doing the correct thing with the plates, I’m also the one that every comes to talk to about it. I think it has something to do with the fact that the people who notice don’t get to work until about 10 AM, and they don’t come out of their morning comas until AFTER day shift has left. So I keep getting “a talking to” about labeling plates correctly.

So I try and pass on the talking to, but we keep changing who is running the damn Biomeks, so there’s always someone who doesn’t know about the new policy.

This is because my boss hasn’t bothered to broadcast a new policy. I found out about it by word of mouth, and confirmed it by going to my shift manager and the people who get the plates after me, and making sure that I’m doing what they want me to.

It’s weird. This place is fanatical about systems and proceedures, yet they are HORRIBLE about diseminating information. So there are policy changes, but no one knows about them so they aren’t implemented.

It doesn’t help that in the 6? 7? weeks I’ve worked here, there’s been one departmental meeting. We’re supposed to meet weekly. Not that I’m that big on meetings, but I do, at least, want to know what’s going on. The change that led to this plate labeling issue was never even announced. It just sort of went into effect one day. Somewhere down the line someone had to make a concious decision about it, but my department found out about it because we started getting only one kind of plate. I mean, was it so damn hard to send an email?

Anyway, since half the damn department was on vacation when this occured, they have no idea, and since there is no documentation, they just plod along and assume it’s fine.

And now I have to re-label their plates, and deal with the incident reports.

Because my boss won’t send one fucking email.

Damn right, baby. PMS, harness the power!

2 batches of completely fucked up plates, 2 sets of priority “you have to find a way to get them sequenced TONIGHT!” plates, covering for someone else so she could go out for the evening (she had plans… whoopty-fuckin-doo), multiple broken machines, and general jealousy in other departments about the fact that I get to “talk on my cell phone all night at work”.

I don’t get to talk on my fucking cell phone. I listen to my ipod. But because everyone else is fucking jealous, my boss says I’m not allowed to use headphones anymore. “But you can still hook it up to external speakers!” Great. Except I listen to liberal propoganda and rhetoric, profane stand up comedy, and when I’m really lucky, a combination thereof. I feel weird about openly listening to the former, as one of the first things I signed on my first day was a piece of paper saying that I would “uphold the US government”, and I seriously doubt that listening to people talk about why our president is an unmitigated ass with the IQ of a hamster’s shoe size counts. And the others are rife with language that is not “work appropriate”.

For all the times I’ve had to hear the phrase “life isn’t fair”… (including hearing it twice in the first 45 minutes of my day this morning…) @#$%$&@#$%(@))!%&#

By the end of the evening, everytime something else went wrong, I went running for the bathroom. My stomach had just had it. Stress related IBS. The capstone of any winning night.

And then…

Monday, August 22, 2005

IT Division to Cut Costs, Reduce Workforce

Due to anticipated flat funding, higher fixed cost and inflation, reductions must be made in the FY 2006 budget. Therefore, the portion of the Information Technology (IT) Division funded by overhead and recharge entered into a Reduction in Force (RIF) effective Aug. 17, 2005.

It bodes not well.

Last night, by the time work ended, I was losing my mind.

Not in a this-is-driving-me-bat-shit-fucking-crazy kind of way, it was more of a delusional-mind-snap, wave-bye-bye-as-you-watch-
your-brain-revolve-slowly-around-the-toilet-bowl-and-be-
flushed-away-forever kind of thing.

I blame the fact that it was a rough week at work. The woman who normally runs the Biomeks during the morning shift went on vacation for 10 days. The woman who covered for her knew how to run the Biomeks, and nothing else. This doesn’t sound like a big deal on the surface, but what it meant was that ALL of the maintenance required to make the damn things work fell to me. I didn’t realize how much maintenance was involved.

Some of it were little things, like emptying the autoclave waste, and putting more plate seals out so we could seal the plates as they came off. Some of it were big things like washing the beads (take about 90 minutes, minimum) and changing the tips. (Not that changing the tips takes more than a few minutes, but then you have to run a QC on them, and that takes considerably longer.)

She did none of it. I’d get there, and there’d be no plate seals, all 4 trash cans would be full, the tips were still nasty and unchanged, and we’d be running out of beads. It takes a while to restock a lab, and it seemed like I did it every damn day this week.

So I was tired, and kind of brain dead to begin with.

And then I got in the car and the radio happened to be playing Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks. And my brain snapped.

See, there’s this South Park episode where they mistake a goat for Stevie nicks, and ship it off to Afghanistan to sing for the troops in a USO show. And there’s one brief scene of the goat in a skirt, bleating along to Edge of Seventeen.

“Blaaa!”

“Blaaa!”

“Blaaa!”

I bleeted along to that and all the other songs I heard on the radio, all the way home.

“Blaaa!”

I’ve discovered the wide wonderful world of podcasts.

I wasn’t really interested in them until I found that I liked audiobooks and stand up to listen to at work. The core parts of my job are becoming pretty routine, so I can listen while I work. But you can only listen to the same two ebooks and four stand up routines so many times a day.

Then I remembered Podcasting.

So far I’ve been just dabbling around.. I love Skepticality’s Whimsicality casts, but can’t stand their regular ones. Science Friday is good if I’m in the right mood. I subscribed to Audible Proops cause it was worth it.

I’m looking for more though… especially comedy, but anything really.

Anyone have any suggestions?

BS – Bull Shit
MS – More Shit
PhD – Pilin’ it High and Deeper

I shall cherish this break from Work Appropriate Behavior (TM) because I believe it will be one of the last I hear from my Shift Manager; apparently she’s now trying to cut profanity out of her vocabulary.

Her reason? Yesterday her four year old daughter accidentally knocked a glass of water off the table, and blurted out “Oh, shit.” Apparently it sounded quite natural rolling off her tongue too.

I couldn’t help but grin.

(That was sarcasm by the by…) Have scientists from Singapore come and hang out in your bay, looking over your shoulder, and asking questions in their quiet, polite voices.

I’d have more appreciation for the quietness of their speech if it weren’t for the fact that you have to talk pretty damn loud to make yourself heard over one Biomek in full swing, to say nothing of the racket that four of them make.

I definitely wasn’t at my best, as they wanted to watch me work, and of course I was totally distracted by their presence, so it wasn’t quite as smooth as I would have hoped, but over all I think it went okay.

There was a moment of complete awe though…

These people are here from Singapore to learn how to expand their sequencing program, which consists of 1 Biomek (the machines I run, of which we have 7 total) and 4 sequencers (We have about 120 sequencers total).

The moment of awe was this: finding out that people come from the other side of the world to learn from us because this is the premiere sequencing facility on the planet.

Prior, I wasn’t even positive that we were the largest in the nation.

That answers that question.

Which brings up the next question: how the hell did I qualify to work here?

Washing the magnetic beads we use to isolate the DNA. They come in a saline solution, so we have to wash the sodium off them. The large dot is a cluster of beads. The trail below it are the beads flowing away from the cluster, heading towards the magnet on the opposite side of the tube. It looks far cooler in person