2007-05-09 - 5:24 p.m.

..a productive day!...

Today we had a PRODUCTIVE day in the lab! My student Bridget was working on samples all morning, and when I came in for the afternoon, we set up one of the machines for measuring mineral contents. It involved a lot of cleaning and preparing of solutions, and grinding and weighing..

Of course, the day wouldn't be perfect without some problems - for some reason the distilled water has been turned off. urgh. And one of the gaskets in the brand new sink cracked. double urgh.

I must say, following months of making a stink over security, I don't feel all that popular when I call about another problem...I went to the upstairs to the faculty office to ask how to do things, and I saw the assistant who has dealt with me on all of these issues literally RUN into his office. Well, okay, when the secretary called him back, he gave a quick answer. But I did kinda feel like the plague.

I called and spoke to the "contractor who was hired to communicate with the contractors" (I kid you not, that's how he was introduced to me). And I explained that little gasket issue. He sighed heavily and said, "all right I'll be right down." Just at that moment I remembered that I had a spare gasket (these are these super specialized, silicon doo-jabbies) and could fix the problem myself. So I called him right back and told him not to bother coming down.

His reply, "You've just regained your superstar status."

??

What in the world does THAT mean?

I just laughed and said, "Okay, talk to you later." and felt slightly sheepish for the rest of the day, especially when I had to call back at the end of the day to say that the distilled water was still not fixed. Sigh. There is an inherent urge to shoot the messenger, isn't there.

Oh well - the good news is that we've got one machine up and running, and may even be able to run off the first set of numbers by the end of this week.

And now onto other fires....