affable-lurking

of a semi-employed physicist.

6:40 am - Wake up, locate glasses and laptop, check email from bed. No job offers have appeared overnight.

7:20 am - Head downstairs to make tea, start process of becoming less human. Watch BBC news, wonder about the standard of science reporting on TV.

8:00 am - Head to work

9:00 am - Get to office to discover I was beaten in by PhD student. Get coffee from the machine because it is less vile than the tea. Check email, usenet, blogs, webcomics.

10:00 am - Head into the workshop to finish building a 40 dB power tap for the logarithmic amp. Get as far as drilling four holes and fitting two connectors before I realise the rest of the parts have still not arrived.

10:45 am - More coffee.

10:50 am - Console PhD student that has just found out a vacuum flange she ordered six months ago (and which has finally arrived) is useless. It is a custom made part and can’t be sent back. Try and find someone that might be able to make it work for her.

11:23 am - Stuck waiting on an email from the HOD in reply to a proposed project. PhD student finds a way to work around the problem - just need someone that can produce vacuum compatible welds.

11:40 am - Email arrives from Elsevier Author Services containing the offprint of my latest paper. Yay! Still no word or sign of HOD.

11:46 am - Pondering lunch.

12:30 pm - Lunch at desk. Have located parts to finish building the 40 dB power tap.

12:53 pm - Every soldering iron the dept appears to be dead except a stonking great 500 watt job - you could solder up whiskey stills with this…

13:32 pm - Set up printer for PhD student.

13:47 pm - Get email from old PhD supervisor promising some samples to play with.

14:57 pm - Power tap is finished.

16:40 pm - Head home, pass up chance to perhaps, maybe, see the Elephant Man’s skeleton (not much chance of seeing it anyway)

18:00 pm - Home. Do stuff. Working day at an end (well apart from some writing and some code for another project)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 8th, 2007 at 5:41 pm and is filed under General, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.