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There’s a new guy at work.  He’s pretty dumb.  Maybe it’s because he’s uncoordinated, but I think dumb is a simple cover.  I showed him how to do a test to determine the capacity of an ostomy pouch.  It’s about as tricky as you think it is:  You take a pouch, fill it with water, and empty the pouch measuring how much water comes out, oooooo.  It took this guy 6 tries.  I had to change my lab coat because he covered me in food-colored water, twice.  There was a total variance of about 40% in his measurements, I’m confident someone could have a seizure while doing the test and get more consistent results.

He also talks on his phone a lot, one my pet peeves in the lab.  We don’t deal with flesh-eating bacteria or toxic chemicals, but still it’s a lab.  He talks loudly and in some variation of Mandarin or Cantonese but he sounds like he’s making it up as he goes along.  I’ve heard people yell into a cell phone before in most languages used in China but his just didn’t sound right.  He also wears T-shirts to work.  T-shirts…  We’re a testing lab, but please, some decorum.

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We’ve been going through a bit of a slimming down at work material-wise getting rid of a large quantity of excess materials, mostly by just shit canning them.  One material we use, comfort panel, is an oleophilic (absorbs oil) material and I thought it’d work great at the Camporee for an idea I’ll simply call “Paintball Art”.  I found a roll of the stuff that was marked “SCRAP” but it was a bit big.  Probably near a few thousand feet long, 5 feet tall and I’d say near 100 pounds, so not something I was going to slip into my pocket, brief case or under my lab coat.  My boss helped me orchestrate Operation:Take Something We Were Throwing Out Anyway and at the end of the day, we rolled out the stuff and dumped it in my car.  As I was returning the cart I used I was stopped by security.

Security Guard: Sir, what did you just do?
Me: I put a roll of scrap destined for trash into the back of my car.
Security Guard: But you used the tank cart, the Security Captain thinks it could have been propane.
Me: That’s ridiculous…
Security Guard: How can we tell if we don’t look?
Me: Well, the roll I took was 5 foot tall, white, had no cap, was hollow and was non-chalantly dumped into my car.  Propane tanks are four foot tall, blue and kinda explosive.

She didn’t buy it and checked anyway.  She poked the roll with her flashlight a bit, as if somehow I’d found a way to hollow out a propane tank or tried to determine how snuggably soft it was.

Security Guard: Hm…  So, how do you like the Toyota Matrix?

Next Friday: Stealing a propane tank.

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I’ve been trying to find a better way to nap.  For the longest time I had a silent egg timer that only made noise when the alarm went off.  Most egg timers make annoying ticking noises which makes napping nigh impossible.  I’d been told about Pzizz a piece of nap software that generates mp3s of specific times for naps.  Normally I’d include a link but I think this is something you should avoid.  Anyway, I generated a 20 minute “Energizer” nap and discovered by they named it that.  The piece starts off with soothing music and a guy telling you to relax which is fine for the first two minutes.  About five minutes later, the same guy comes back and effectively yells at you to relax.  He then yells at you approximately every four to five minutes keeping you on edge and quite “energized”.  After 13 minutes of this I finally nodded off and didn’t wake up for two and a half hours and this is why:  The voice that tells you to wake-up is quieter than the narration voice.

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In a recent meeting where we nearly got a Sundae Bar, we were also told we needed to clean up the labs to be more “efficient”. Crazy Germans. Anyway, as the whole building was cleaning I was continually bombarded with the following: “Can the Boy Scouts use” followed by something of varying utility. Here’s a list of what I was offered:

  • Array of plastic bins (taken)
  • 200 foot roll of polyurethane foam (not taken, too big)
  • Collection of bottles that clearly looked like they were meant to store bleach (water bottles!)
  • High Pressure Liquid Chromatography set-up (not taken, I don’t care if Science can use it)
  • 200 bottles of hypoallergenic hand cream (taken, I now have very smooth hands and so can you)
  • Cardboard cores (taken, must find use for them)
  • 8000 glass pipettes (not taken, 8000?)

There were a few others but I nearly unplugged my phone after I was offered 14 high stretch fistula straps which are essentially surgical sumo diapers.

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I woke up this morning and could barely see straight. I wrote an email to my boss saying I wouldn’t be and nearly fell of my chair. This continued until about 45 minutes after my father returned from work. Apparently recovered I prepared dinner and during its course he asked if I hated the peach-scented aromatic diffusers my brother had installed as much as he did. I found one, sniffed it and immediately felt dizzy. Superman’s weakness is kryptonite, mine is a peach-scented Glade plug in knock off. Needless to say, the Robinson’s household garbage smells quite peachy. I look forward to return to work on Friday and trying to kill my brother in his sleep on Saturday.

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I woke up this morning and could barely see straight. I wrote an email to my boss saying I wouldn’t be and nearly fell of my chair. This continued until about 45 minutes after my father returned from work. Apparently recovered I prepared dinner and during its course he asked if I hated the peach-scented aromatic diffusers my brother had installed as much as he did. I found one, sniffed it and immediately felt dizzy. Superman’s weakness is kryptonite, mine is a peach-scented Glade plug in knock off. Needless to say, the Robinson’s household garbage smells quite peachy. I look forward to return to work on Friday and trying to kill my brother in his sleep on Saturday.

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We had a lunch meeting with our new department manager for R&D who told us how our firm has done and what changes we might expect in the workplace.  We’ve done very well and are starting to reverse some of the cost cutting measures so sometime this week our water coolers will come back.  We prodded him more to see what else we could get and soon we found out if our luck continued we’d get all our old amenities back.  This manager was new so I figured I could try something.

Me:  Do you think we could get our meeting budget back?  We used to have food during lunch meetings.
Manager:  I don’t see why not.
Me: So, we could bring back free bagels on Friday? (which we never had)
Manager: Well, I guess if we can justify it.
Another temp picking up on what I’m doing: So you’re saying, six months or so we could get the espresso machine back? (which we also never had)
Manager: I love a good espresso.

By the time we were done we’d almost gotten a soda fountain and build-your-own sundae bar.

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The freezer at work is continually shrinking due to the steady encroachment of idiocy and icing.  There’s an obese woman the hoards diet freezer pops and the frost has extended to the point that I can barely squeeze in an ice tray where once I had three.

The power went out at some point last night for four or five hours and the fridge died in the process. when I got in this morning my ice had melted, even though the freezer frost was completely untouched and possibly bigger, in clear violation of the second law of thermodynamics.  I was angry and pouty over my lost ice until a fat-laden voice bellowed “my health bars!”

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The 2nd day of the 5 day meeting marathon went down today and again, around 6 PM there was a cornucopia of coffees, drinks, individual serving cakes and cheeses including what tasted like peppered mozzarella (genius!)  I enter the room and shortly afterwards a facilities fellow walked in, presumably to change some ceiling lights, and I offered him some of the bounty to which he responded “I’m like a mouse, I might have some Swiss cheese”.  I carry out six or seven cans of soda and return to find the food trays stripped.  All the food is completely gone and even the utensils and tea bags had been taken.  Yeah, mouse-like, a mouse with a forklift.

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During Spring break I enjoy the long-time tradition of college students with jobs: overtime.  Yesterday I was tooling around the building look for morsels and scraps from meetings when I hit a stockpile of goods: 12 bottles of water, 6 granola bars, about 20 cans of soda and a bowl of mixed nuts.  From the fact that there were no Brazil nuts in the mix I could tell this meeting was for important people.  Then I found a cache of leather folios for the meeting attendants.  I took them, in an effort to curry favor with my coworkers as I couldn’t reasonably use more than one.

I brought them back to the lab and presented them, in a moment one person asked “thanks, but who’s Rebecca Stimpton?”

Apparently I didn’t notice the engraved steel name plate on the back of each.  Oops.