It’s not exactly the beach…
splashing around in the muck and the mire

I was working in the fumehood this evening and some guy walked through, looking lost. This isn’t uncommon: We often have people walking around the lab that I don’t recognize. There are visitor badges, but the only person I’ve ever seen wear one was me, when I first toured the lab during my interview. When [...]

Working an evening shift tonight and the owner of the company came by and pulled all but three of us to go to a city council meeting and argue his side of something. I guess a company wants to develop some waterfront land that’s adjacent to land my boss recently bought. It was promised as [...]

For the past three weeks, my sort-of-boss (I have something like 4 or 5 different bosses, each a different level of “superior” to me) has advised me not to work too hard on Fridays and then made mention of this “5% Friday.” Presumably the 5% would be the effort put in on a Friday. At [...]

Job update for those wondering: It’s going well. It keeps me busy. It’s nothing that requires my brain but it does use the lab-specific skills I picked up in my labs at school, and I did enjoy those activities in school. So as a thing to do all day to earn money, it’s easy and [...]

Things I learned this week… 1. CF Mineral Research: Owned by Chuck Fipke – the Canadian who discovered diamonds in the North-West Territories. 2. His divorce settlement was the largest in Canada because they were married before his diamond discoveries made him a multimillionaire. Haven’t met the man yet, though I hear he comes in [...]

My first day as their new Lab Assistant was today and it went well. They’re starting me out working in the fume hoods, using a separatory funnel to do a liquid separation (some portions of the sample sink while others float). Lots of cleaning things with acetone = numb hands.

Today I had an interview for a company that analyzes mineral samples for mining companies: Breaking the rock sample down and looking for diamond indicators, also sometimes gold and other precious metals.
They gave me an in-depth tour during which I tried to convince them I wasn’t overqualified and would be fine starting at the bottom [...]