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random musings of a crazy cat lady

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Control Freak

It may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you that I am a control freak at work. Then again, maybe it doesn't. Nonetheless I don't remember being one in my previous job. It helped that my former coworkers were pretty competent, to say the least.
I knew I'd be a control freak about my robot. I didn't realize I'd turn into a control freak about all the other instruments in the room.
It didn't start out that way. The first instruments arrived, were set up, I got trained on them, trained the students how to use them, and then tried to become somewhat hands off. This failed miserably at first. I have difficulty ignoring anything that is in my lab, but was just enough hands on to feel annoyed by it but was not hands on enough to prevent the inevitable problems caused by carelessness. Thus commenced a long and annoying bout of troubleshooting, punctuated by the arrival of two more pieces of equipment. I won't bore you with the details, I was a very cranky old biddy for a while. Eventually I got everything up and running.
During this time, I had a conversation with my boss. He knew I was frustrated by things and suggested that I let the students take full responsibility for the non-robotic equipment. I did and felt a lot better and had more time for chemistry.
You can probably guess where this is going. Yup. When I got back from vacation the fussiest of the instruments had been allowed to run dry. I started to troubleshoot, and then realized that it was completely fucked up that I was even considering doing this on New Years Eve. Anyway, it will take a bit of troubleshooting and I am pretty annoyed. I had debated taking the instrument off-line over vacation, but the student who's in charge was around wanted to use it. I don't like being a control freak, but the alternative is still a pain.

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