10-things I hate about my playmates... (in the lab)

*excerpt from my other blog, 15/09/06

No, I am NOT playing whatever in the lab. I am WORKING, you see... But as all lab-workers know, working in the lab = playing. Just as what my supervisor always said whenever I got stucked, "just try to play around a bit, maybe you'll have different results..." And as I spent most of my evenings and weekends with all my little tubes and my machine here, they become very intimate to me. You see, I spent more times trying to understand them than to understand a guy.
However, sometimes you really got stucked... stucked... stucked... Here are the-10-things I hate about them:

1. They always like to give you nice surprises, e.g. suddenly behaving differently, giving you unexpected (and unexplained) results ... and at surprising times also, i.e. near the deadlines

2. They follow the weather's change and they have bad moods also. When your work involving chemical-interactions, then you'll see differences on the day and at night, in summer and in winter... The worst is when you already have temperature control, then you can't blame the weather anymore when you have bad results :-(

3. They can be very very stubborn! You flirt with them, give a lot of attention, even change your daily habits, and they still do not change. You stretch your imagination as widely as possible to find yet another approach and minimize your sleeping and resting time just for them to give you a little bit of nice results, and they refuse!!!

4. Okay, this is a chemical-physical experiment, so everything must behave according to the law of nature, right? Oh no, no... just like a kungfu master never told all their secret, there is always something you can't explain. You know, they have to be myterious to be interesting.

5. Have you ever heard of "derivatization"? When you put some stones into your pillow case, wrap everything together and throw it to somebody that you hate, that's derivatization. You attach something, some additional molecules, to your original compound and make it useful in different way then (because now his chemical charateristic has been changed).
Now, sometimes you'll see your compound turning to different colour after you derivatized him. You measure everything, check everything, make sure that everything is exactly the same (because this is lab, everything is controlled so you know what to blame), and then your compound thinks, "Wow, what a boring life, let's make some fun. Let's turn into different shades of purple!!" ... yes, what fun!!! you don't want different shades of purple!!! you want just one purple, exactly the same like yesterday and last week!!

6. What do you do when you smell something very bad in your kitchen? Like smell of rotten eggs, 1 kg fish, or 10-months-unwashed-socks? Now, you'll do something, right? You'll find the source of the smell and discharge it. We, in the lab, also do something. We use them! yes, the source of the smell, they're useful! And not only very smelly, they come with other features also, e.g. highly flammable, highly toxic and carcinogenic.

7. Having made a mistake, you go home and write in your lab-journal: "I will never forget to double the compound A when I use twice the compound B anymore" - 100 times. The day after, you come to the lab, perform exactly the correct procedure, double both A and B, and....... a result even far than what you have expected. Now you go home, write 100 times in your journal: "I hope life gives me mercy"

8. When something is not working, then other things also. This is a neverending Murphy's law. You're lucky when it lasts only several days.

9. You have several Gbytes of data in your computer, which you can explain only less than half of them.

10. You spend months working in the lab, trying to get some results. Instead, you're getting addicted to "S@#&!! It's not working AGAIN!!"

Now, I will go home and contemplate the famous line: "it has been worst, but then it can only be better". Having experienced these things for several years, you realized how true this sentence could be......

Oh no, no, today is not the worst! tomorrow...