(no subject)
Work, being work, continues a pace. I think I must be getting a cold, I've been hypersensitive to noise the last couple of days, even taking into account the fact that I have a limited noise tolerance anyway. Yesterday, between the hissing nitrogen taps and a coworker blasting heavy metal, I was about ready to kill something. I settled for a pair of earplugs, but all they really did was make it hard to hear anyone who was talking to me. I was contemplating whether there was a way to wear two pairs at once, but I concluded that the answer was no. I really do need to talk to Harry about the music. Aside from the fact that I just plain don't care for heavy metal (neither does anyone else in that lab), it's distracting, and it sets off the Sensory Integration Disorder something awful. I'd been hoping the problem would resolve itself, since last staff meeting, the bosses declared that all music must be not only at reasonable volumes, but also work-appropriate, and The Buzz, the station Harry likes, definitely does not meet those criteria. Name me one occupation where Californication is work-appropriate. "Prostitute" and "porn star" don't count. Nickelback's Rockstar is bad too. And their humor talk shows aren't funny, they're just offensive. Thing is, Harry's a really nice guy who's practically never too busy to show me something when stuff comes up that I don't know how to do, so I don't want to hurt his feelings.
Learned how to use a glove bag today, which was kinda cool. Solvent-land has been uber-slow lately, so I've been taking some of the other trackers that don't have weird stuff on them to help alleviate the backlog, which is how I came to be handling an air-sensitive solid. Air-sensitive liquids, you just use a nitrogen-flushed syringe, but air sensitive solids need a full nitrogen atmosphere, which requires a glove bag. They seriously need to make those in female sizes, the gloves on that thing were like twice the size of my hands at least. It was the bench-top equivalent of a spacewalk trying to handle tiny meltpoint tubes in those things. Luckily this wasn't a spontaneously-combusts-in-air sample, this one just has a tendency to absorb CO2, which can make the IR go screwy, and occasionally the GC as well. Looking at my IR spectrum, I may have picked up a little CO2, but not much, so that's good.
Learned how to use a glove bag today, which was kinda cool. Solvent-land has been uber-slow lately, so I've been taking some of the other trackers that don't have weird stuff on them to help alleviate the backlog, which is how I came to be handling an air-sensitive solid. Air-sensitive liquids, you just use a nitrogen-flushed syringe, but air sensitive solids need a full nitrogen atmosphere, which requires a glove bag. They seriously need to make those in female sizes, the gloves on that thing were like twice the size of my hands at least. It was the bench-top equivalent of a spacewalk trying to handle tiny meltpoint tubes in those things. Luckily this wasn't a spontaneously-combusts-in-air sample, this one just has a tendency to absorb CO2, which can make the IR go screwy, and occasionally the GC as well. Looking at my IR spectrum, I may have picked up a little CO2, but not much, so that's good.