boys are weird, part 2

The lab was really busy last night, with every zone going and going strong. We were supposed to have five lab techs, which would have been manageable, but someone called in, so there were only four of us.

I was in the least busy zone, making me the only one with any time to spare, which meant I did every one of the daily tasks and then ran around helping everyone else. I've had busier nights, but because I was trying to run my own zone and help with four others, I was really overwhelmed and scattered.

Also, I was tired and in kind of a bad mood before I even went to work and I was getting really angry with the one person who was not quite pulling his weight in terms of the workload we had.

I went into the blending control room for something and was venting a little (okay, a lot...) and out of nowhere, as I am frazzled and kind of yelling and insane, #1 looks at me and says, "you're cute."

WHAT?

boys are weird

Before last night, MH was off for three nights in a row, while I suffered without my best workfriend. Apparently, she spent a fair amount of her time off drunk, and so she spent most of the night telling hilarious stories about the weekend.

There is a guy at work (not any of the numbers) who has a crush on MH and has been insistently trying to get her to hang out with him for a couple of weeks. On one of her nights off, while she was bar-hopping, he was text messaging and calling her in order to try and meet up with her. Even had she wanted to spend time with him, it sounds as if she was too drunk to arrange such a thing.

Texting her from twenty yards away on the floor, he mentioned that while drunk and talking to him on the phone, she had repeatedly told him to shut up, even when he wasn't talking.

This, he says, was "adorable."

Another guy she had met at a bar told her that the way she was stumbling drunk and saying mean things was "cute."

She is an attractive girl, no mistake, but what is with these guys' perception of cute?

best DK moment ever

The rheometer is an instrument used to test viscosity. This morning, when a line fill for nectar came in, our rheometer would not work. The only test we do on a nectar line fill is the rehometer.
DK was still there at this point and he tried to get it to work, but was unsuccessful. He said, "fine, just do a bostwick on it."

Bostwick is also a test for viscosity, but we don't usually use it for nectar, which is too thin to get any kind of accurate or meaningful result. Therefore, we have no specification for what the result of a bostwick on nectar should be.

I did a bostwick on the nectar. I got a result of about four seconds.

DK left without mentioning what result should be accepted.

save the last case?

I was in tetra tonight. I was in a pretty good mood because it was a slow night and everything was pretty much done before one. #4 even saved me a case I didn't really need when his line started up.

Then, the soup running on C and D ended around 0220. When I was getting my audit at 0210 I asked the stackers on both lines to save me the last case. Both of them made eye contact and acknowledged my request.

Around 0230, when I had finished the rest of my audit, I went to grab my end cases.

There were no end cases.

I know that they are temps and that they are being paid $8/hr to stack boxes, but seriously how difficult is it to follow simple instructions?

That's two whiny complaining blogs in a row. Sorry, internet, hopefully no one screws me over tonight.

autoclaves

It was about a month ago that we had a lab meeting, during which CK and DK assured us that we would soon not only have a new autoclave, they were going to rework the plumbing that feeds the autoclaves because the pipes run the wrong way and that's pretty much the reason that we wear down an autoclave that should last twenty years in less than five.

As of now, there has been no further mention of this plan. We still have one working autoclave (and one busted one). The one that is supposedly working must be cooled down almost completely in between runs. This takes about an hour. Each run takes about an hour. Assuming someone is watching closely and that everything that needs to be autoclaved is ready to go in at the right time, the autoclave could be run four times a shift. Realistically, it is more like three.

On third shift, we have to make VRB every day. That takes up one autoclave run. Plates take up another (why we have to sterilize garbage is beyond me...). That leaves one autoclave run for anything else we might possibly need.

Last night, plates went in first, because there were about three shifts' worth from the Christmas break. After that, we needed VRB bottles and we needed flasks. Luckily, these two items can go together. Unluckily, the autoclave failed THREE times before we managed to get it running.

If we only have one semi-working autoclave...how are we supposed to get everything done if 'semi-working' becomes....'occasionally maybe working'?

what we do

Last night I got paid to watch movies and eat Chinese food.

Merry Christmas, internet.

bad timing

DK actually had off for Christmas, so last night CK was in late to make sure everything was okay for the holiday. She said her goodbyes and merry Christmases around midnight.

Shortly after she left the lab, MH and I went for a coffee break. As we were walking out, CK walked out of the restroom, on her way out of the building. This encounter would not be a problem, except that MH and I were having a conversation about the fight MH was having with her mother. MH was explaining how she didn't even want to go to her family's Christmas celebration because she was so mad and didn't want her mother to enjoy the holiday. As we walked out of the hallway, I said, "yeah, I can just see you walking up to your mom and saying..." and as CK walked into our path...

"I hope your Christmas sucks!"

pleasant as HELL

A conversation with one of the guys in tetra from last night:

Him: Hey, why aren't you smiling?
Me: I didn't realize it was part of my job description to be smiling 100% of the time.
Him: Oh it is. You need to smile more. You should be pleasant all the time. You should be pleasant like a motherfucker.
Me: Exactly how pleasant would a motherfucker be?
Him: Soooo pleasant. Pleasant like a motherfucker.
Me: Really, though, I'd imagine a motherfucker wouldn't be all that pleasant.
Him: ...depends on how many mothers are around.

oh, boys

#2 was picking on me all night, presumably insulted by my comments last night, to the point where MH asked me something about my 'boyfriend', because obviously he must like me (again). Apparently the guys in the plant all express interest in a girl by being mean to her, since of course we are all ten years old.

Later on, I was taking readings on steam infusion when #2 came up to me and asked if I knew where my 'boyfriend', #1, was. I gave him a look of such disgust that he apologized on the spot.

I didn't realize I had a boyfriend at all...last night I had two? Crazy.

$100 for your thoughts

#2 dyed his hair so bleach blond it just kind of blends in with his skin.

I happened to mention that I think he looks like a giant penis. GP offered me one hundred dollars to tell that to #2.

While he was very serious about the offer, I would not have taken his money if he had tried to give it to me.

The reaction from #2 was payment enough for me.

guilty

That pudding mishap I mentioned yesterday - the start-up and end of the run had to be tested. I tested the end of the run, which was at 2323 and plated the three samples that were there, but the start-up was at 2148, which is a second shift time. Obviously, I was really annoyed that I didn't know pudding was running in the first place, so I left those start-up samples for Tea to test instead of doing it myself.

I knew it was kind of bitchy, but Tea had screwed me over and it was her responsibility to begin with.

Now, however, I feel awful about it, because I came in last night to find that another second shifter, MC, had tested the samples I left for Tea.

I got Tea'd. So bad.

Last night was going quite well, really, until about 4am. I was in tetra and it was really, really slow for midweek. I had one filler of soup and some horizon, which ended halfway through the shift. I had a full hour without any tetra audit because horizon had ended and the soup was having problems.
Around 4, when I was coming back from lunch, the soup had started running again and I was going to check on a possible start-up when one of the guys who runs 4oz stopped me and told me that there were some samples sitting over there from a flavor change yesterday.

Wait, what? I was in 4oz yesterday...it ended before I came in. Second shift told me that pudding was finished and all I had was BNB.

No. Tea TOLD me that pudding ended at 2120. She just didn't happen to notice that they changed flavors at 2120 and came back up at 2148. How do you not know whether or not a run is finished? They ran for more than an hour and a half - that's about 1000 cases of pudding. How do you not notice they still have vanilla in the surge? How do you not notice that they aren't cleaning up and shutting down the machines?

Luckily they saved the samples and I was able to test and plate the stuff, but I know DK is going to have an epic freakout when he sees this.

sticky

I freely admit that I am clumsy. I drop things, I spill things, I trip over my own feet - I am almost entirely lacking anything that could possibly be called grace.

Island Oasis is one of the thickest, stickiest products we run. It is packaged on the 'bag-in-a-box' filler, which is exactly what it sounds like. The product come off line in these 2 or 2.5 gallon slippery metallic bags. The lab tech must take a big, heavy bag of liquid back to the lab, cut open a corner and pour it into comically over-sized graduated cylinders to measure the volume.

I was running bag-in-a-box all night.

I didn't spill a goddamn drop of the crap.

Instead, I managed to wrangle 2 gallon bags all night without problem, but dropped a 250ml pak of Enlive with the top cut open while moving it from four inches away from the sink to the sink - all over myself and the floor.

personal day

In the interest of updating five days a week, and since I did get paid for last night, here is a non-work related update:

Yesterday was my last personal day of the year. I strung it together with my regular days off to get a five day weekend and go on a road trip. What this boils down to, essentially, is that yesterday I got paid to go to an Islanders game (first time I've seen them win in person in two years) and fall asleep watching Lost with my best friend (whom I haven't seen since April).

Best night of 'work' ever.

start-ups

When I arrived at work at 10pm, I was told that ESL had gone down due to a power failure and that the run would restart around 2am.
Around 3am, I was told that ESL was going to start up around 4:30.
Around 5am, I asked the PO if ESL was ever going to start up and he said, "maybe around 5:30."
When I left at 6:30am, ESL had not yet started.

beavisisms

In a shocking, but amazing moment of clarity this evening, I realized that almost everything Beavis ever says makes a perfect 'that's what she said.'

whoops

I was standing in the blending control room writing down my inventories, innocently minding my own business, when VM snuck up behind me and poked me in the side of the neck with, I think, a pen.

This action was rather upsetting to me, as I HATE having my neck touched at all, but that is a post for another day, internet.

Later on, at the end of our shift, I told MH about the neck-poking incident and we got into an incredibly inappropriate but hilarious discussion of what VM could have poked me with, if not a pen, and the logistics thereof.

It wasn't until I walked away from that conversation that I realized we were just a thin wall away from the blending control room. I glanced in and found VM, Beavis, SW and two other blenders there, in easy earshot of the entire thing.

getting Smitty'd

On second shift, there are a couple of people who probably should not be working in the lab. One of them, HG, has been there for a very long time and she just doesn't care about the job, so she often causes problems for the following shift by omitting necessary information or giving us information that is completely wrong. Therefore, on third shift, whether it is her fault or not, if one of us gets screwed over through someone else's negligence, we call it "getting HG'd".

The other second shifter I referred to is Tea, who means well, but just can't seem to keep up sometimes and tends to cause problems for the following shift by leaving messes and giving wrong information because she doesn't know better. Therefore, on third shift, whether it is her fault or not, if one of us gets screwed over through someone else's ignorance, we call it "getting Tea'd".

Tonight, I got Smitty'd. I'm not sure how much I've said about Smitty in this blog, but she is pretty much a superhero. When I said something about "getting Smitty'd," I think everyone was a little horrified that I would ever say anything bad about our beloved Smitty, until I explained...getting Smitty'd is what happens when you are not particularly busy, but someone else (who is probably Smitty and who probably has other things to do, as well) gets all your work done before you get a chance to start it.

Getting Smitty'd is...awesome.

and the opposite

Last night nothing happened, tonight was not busy in general, but there was one ten minute span of time in which EVERYTHING went wrong. It was kind of unbelievable.

I walked into the plating prep room and the stir bar was skipping around the edge of my VRB rather than actually stirring it, the autoclave had been finished running for at least an hour (it's only supposed to sit for twenty minutes max after it's done), and the plating room table was a mess. I fixed all of these things, turned up the temperature on the VRB and went to plate. When I walked out of the plating room, the VRB was boiling over everywhere. When I poured it, I sloshed boiling agar all over the counter and my arm. When I finally cleaned up that disaster and went back to plating, I managed to get chicken broth in my eye.

The rest of the night went perfectly smoothly.

nothing important happened today

I think this probably happens at all jobs, I know it has happened at every job I've ever had...there are shifts that just go by in a blur. Of course this happens when it's so busy you don't have to time to even look at the clock (and maybe you write down two sets of readings for 2345 on one steritank, WHOOPS) but it also happens on nights like last where I basically did nothing for eight hours, I think.

I know I got to work and I know it wasn't busy. I did some 48 hour rheometer readings, read some plates...each of those activities takes half an hour at the absolute most. I have absolutely no idea what I did the rest of the night, but next thing I knew...six AM. Crazy.

antics

On my way to work tonight, #4 almost ran me off the road. When I was in the parking lot getting my stuff together, he opened my door and said, "hey, sorry about that."

There was a mandatory meeting at the beginning of our shift last night. MH made me snort - loud - right in the middle of it. DK said he could hear it all the way out in the hall.

Later on, #4 started throwing paks of nectar at me. I think he expected me to catch them, but I batted them out of the way so they exploded on the floor. I told him if he was going to try to kill me, he was also going to have to clean up his own messes.

Around three, I was playing with the stapler and I got it all jammed. In fixing it, I cut my finger twice. Next hour, I promptly poured straight sulfuric acid all over it (my hand, not the stapler). I thought salt in your wounds was bad...

Also, MH stopped me on the floor of the plant just to tell me that the 4oz processor, nicknamed 'Unsterile' because of how often he screws up the 4oz systems, had just sprayed her in the face with a hose. I laughed so loud (again) that #2 not only stopped what he was doing, but parked his forklift to come find out what had happened.

This is just an average night.

lesson learned

Last night I made a mistake that I will never make again. I asked DK to help me with bloaters (bloaters are basically what they sound like - paks that have something wrong with them so that the product inside rots and curdles and blows the pak up) before I took my lunch break.

Had I been a smarter lab tech, I could have taken a lunch break that a) was earlier, b) was longer, and c) involved actually eating my lunch.