Where the hell is my ginger?
This was the scene a few minutes ago: somewhere in my kitchen there was a bag of chopped ginger which I wanted and which I could not find. I went through the tea shelves, the organizer baskets, all the boxes and tins in the dry-stuff cupboard, and there was no ginger anywhere. It was a big bag: how the hell did I manage to lose it?
So instead of tearing the place apart in rage (where the hell is my ginger) or hysteria (how can I not know where one of my things in my space is), I made good sport of it, decided that my instinctive reactions are mostly amusing, and when I was done deciding that this is more hilarious than anything (which, to my credit, only took seconds, strength of initial response be damned) I reworked the problem.
Among the things i've learned from three years of wet labwork: how to quickly and unerringly backtrack what the hell was I thinkingwhen I put something somewhere. The ginger was in a plain polyethylene bag. It was, as spices go, a large amount. It was a thin bag. The combination makes it vulnerable and I would not have left it exposed, I would have put it in a closed container. I'm looking for a closed container, then, not for the ginger, and it would be a closed container I don't associate with anything else.
Well, there's that tin box on the top shelf which has been empty for as long as I remember. Reach for it and - yes, it doesn't weight empty and yes, there's my ginger inside.
(What does wet labwork has to do with anything: imagine you need to keep track of, literally, over a thousand small items. These items are incredibly small and do not conform to a single or even to three indexing/systematizing schemes. Furthermore, the labels have a nasty tendency to disappear off of those things so the order of items in a set and the reproducibility of said order are key. And because this isn't enough, within the course of each day you'll easily handle over a hundred of the damn things, dozens will be added and dozens will be removed. So you can work slow, or you can come up with complex organization systems, or you can decide that the most reproducible system is your instincts. So mostly, I have zero recollection of what I did with something, but it will be in the first place I look for it.)
This entry was originally posted at http://hagar-972.dreamwidth.org/1481505.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
So instead of tearing the place apart in rage (where the hell is my ginger) or hysteria (how can I not know where one of my things in my space is), I made good sport of it, decided that my instinctive reactions are mostly amusing, and when I was done deciding that this is more hilarious than anything (which, to my credit, only took seconds, strength of initial response be damned) I reworked the problem.
Among the things i've learned from three years of wet labwork: how to quickly and unerringly backtrack what the hell was I thinkingwhen I put something somewhere. The ginger was in a plain polyethylene bag. It was, as spices go, a large amount. It was a thin bag. The combination makes it vulnerable and I would not have left it exposed, I would have put it in a closed container. I'm looking for a closed container, then, not for the ginger, and it would be a closed container I don't associate with anything else.
Well, there's that tin box on the top shelf which has been empty for as long as I remember. Reach for it and - yes, it doesn't weight empty and yes, there's my ginger inside.
(What does wet labwork has to do with anything: imagine you need to keep track of, literally, over a thousand small items. These items are incredibly small and do not conform to a single or even to three indexing/systematizing schemes. Furthermore, the labels have a nasty tendency to disappear off of those things so the order of items in a set and the reproducibility of said order are key. And because this isn't enough, within the course of each day you'll easily handle over a hundred of the damn things, dozens will be added and dozens will be removed. So you can work slow, or you can come up with complex organization systems, or you can decide that the most reproducible system is your instincts. So mostly, I have zero recollection of what I did with something, but it will be in the first place I look for it.)
This entry was originally posted at http://hagar-972.dreamwidth.org/1481505.html. Please comment there using OpenID.