Herculean Effort and Mr. Chainsaw (good name for a band that!)

So today is my ninth (9th) straight day at work and apart from me wondering where the hell the time went (??) it has pretty much been a blur. I've put in some ridiculous hours over these 9 days to catch up all the work that didn't get done (by other people) when I took time off to spend with Rachel. I've pretty much caught up to where we need to be and all it took was 14 hr days, commandeering both Mass Spectrometers and both Gas Chromatographs and snarling like a pit-bull at anyone who even tried to talk to me or "help". We sent 5 GC columns last Friday to our USA office and today we're poised to send 6 more so that should keep the people on the other side of the blue door happy. This was no easy feat seeing as Mass Spec No.1 spent much of the last 9 days broken and is still the Mass Spectrometer equivalent of "Nerd Glasses" which are broken and being held together at the bridge by sticky tape. It now "works" and performs it's function (sort of..) but anyone who looks at it instantly knows that it's not healthy and on life support. This is why I had to also get Mass Spec No.2 in on the fun, the results it gives us are useful (it has no where near the sensitivity of MS No.1 though....and in mass speccing it's all about the sensitivity..oh and the vacuum..sensitivity and sucking...hehehe...also reminds me of another past time...anyway getting side tracked) but because the "client" for this project is the company that actually makes Mass Spec No.1 THEY of course want all the results produced on "their" machines. What they don't know won't hurt them though ...

So here we are at Friday again and (as of yet) there has been no mentions of anyone having to come in again on the weekend to work..let's hope it stays that way.

This morning, as it's WBBC day, I usually allow myself the luxury of 1/2hr extra sleep due to not having to make lunch for myself. So there I am, it's 6:45am and I'm merrily sleeping away dreaming of whatever it was I was dreaming of and suddenly there in my dream is a guy with a chainsaw?? Now, granted over the last 9 days I have thought many thoughts about many different things that could be solved (in my opinion) with the use of a chainsaw, so it's not all together unprecedented that my subconscious had stored this fact and thought that now was a good time to play that back. The subconscious after all is like the normal "Conscious" after several large Beers and 2 bottles of Tequila (i.e. EVERYTHING seems like a good idea regardless). I can't remember the context that Mr. Chainsaw played in my dream as I can't remember what I was actually dreaming about. For the sake of argument, i'll just go with what with I usually dream about which was probably something like being locked in a room covered in honey, surrounded by several diabetic Swedish lingerie models who all had low blood sugar levels and needed to get a sugar fix ASAP. As you can gather, a large, burly man holding a chainsaw and revving the crap out of it is somewhat the "Odd Man Out" in the above scenario. So my conscious brain sort of spoke up, as usually happens in such situations during sleep, and goes "WHAT THE HELL???".

I sort of slipped out out sleep into semi-awakedness and then realised that the chainsaw was infact real. It was being wielded by the people renovating the house next door who thought that 6:47am was the best time for them to start cutting up wood. Now, call me crazy, but there are several dozen other things I can think of that I would consider a good idea to be doing at 6:45am on a Friday morning and most of them involve a lot less chainsawing. So today, my sleep-in-day, actually started earlier than a normal non-sleep-in day. It's like I have some sort of phantom insomniac 3 year old waking me before I am due :( So I got up and did what any normal person rudely awakened in the early hours of the morning would do ..... played a bit of Scrabby (also because the chainsawing was accompanied by the arrival of the rubbish/recycling trucks to form an impenetrable sleep deprivation crescendo of "awake"). In my semi-awake state I didn't remember that I had played all my scrabby last night and would therefor be out of luck. However, upon opening scrabby...there were games to play??? Must have been a long night for my opposition as I went to bed rather late last night and they weren't played then? I quickly played my turns (noting that I am well positioned to win a few games to boot) and then went for a shower ... it was now 7am.

Tomorrow can't come quick enough now. Time off from work and a few exciting things to pass the time.

1) My u10 Basketball team is in the Grand Final :) we're going to get belted...but the fact that we are there is a major achievement in my first season as a coach.

2) My mother is in Melbourne and will actually visit my HOUSE!!! This will be the FIRST member of my family that has ever been to any of the houses I've lived in in Melbourne (I've nearly been here 5 years too!!)

3) My Basketball starts up again on wednesday and I think it's actually time for some new basketball shoes. The one's I've got I bought in Adelaide in 2004 ... so I thnk they have done a good job and besides, I think they are what's responsible for my foot aching for about a week after each game. So a trip into the Converse clearence store when I go get my mother is also on the cards for sunday.

Me 1: Mass Spectrometer 0

As most people would know...I am almost always right and when I am not "right" it is usually just an anomaly and the universe soon corrects itself :P. Today was no exception. After spending my whole weekend at work trying to get the Mass Spectrometer working I proudly got to pronounce it DEAD to the managers out in the front office passed the "Blue Door" this morning.

The Blue Door: where time bends and reality takes a walk into the ridiculous once you pass through.

This door is amazing...once you pass through it from the "Workers" side to the "Managers" side it's like a whole new universe where scientific fact has no value and your IQ apparently drops from .. say..A Ph.D. Qualified Scientist to that of a small unimportant minion who couldn't possibly know what they are on about or can be believed on any topic (I am calling this "Thermo Engineer Syndrome"). So anyway, I went through the aforementioned door today to pronounce the Mass Spec dead and was greeted with such re-assuring logic as "It can't be dead, it's too important that we use it this week!" and "Are you sure? Is it turned on? Does it have petrol in it?" etc. After giving up my entire weekend to battle the illnesses of this machine I was so over trying to justify anything that I just said some thing along the lines of "Yes, it's dead, it doesn't work, here is the output, see that big squiggly line that looks like a guy having a heart attack was holding the pen? That's the background noise from the detector. See that nice sharp peak at 3.8 mins corresponding to the injected standard? NO YOU DONT..BECAUSE IT'S NOT THERE DUE TO THE BROKENNESS!!!" , but was probably less funny and along more apathetic lines.

So, true to form, no one believes that 3 days of me troubleshooting and improvised repairing only to have the repairs break rendering the machine useless for the purpose of measuring mass spectra (which for a machine called a "Mass Spectrometer" should seem like a major flaw) even with print-out showing what was wrong and why I can't fix it were presented. The higher ups decide that it couldn't possibly be broken and not fixable and they'll come out and tinker. Fast Forward 4 hours and we arrive at "I think it's actually broken and there is nothing we can do to fix it. Why didn't you bring this to our attention sooner Michael?" IDIOTS. Nowhere on my job description does it say I have to telepathically predict future events and have ESP abilities??

So I now, in my professional opinion, pronounce that the Thermo DSQ-II mass Spectrometer is Dead :)

The Worlds Most Expensive Door Stop. The Thermo DSQ-II Mass Spectrometer.

Now, I wonder what answer I get when I ask for the 29th September off as time in Lieu for working all weekend flogging a dead horse will be?

Late Afternoon Update (5:30pm): Found the culprit of the leak (just so you all can sleep tonight knowing the drama has ended). Turns out it was the Vent Valve solenoid, I should have been able to spot this earlier as it's photo was quite a pointer that something was wrong...but sometimes you just can't see the Forrest for the other bits of Forrest.

Sweet and Sour.

I was not looking forward to today very much after yesterday. Having to go into work and WORK on the weekend is just wrong on so many levels but since I had no choice in the matter what could I do? The day started off with me not being able to sleep very well, I kept waking up all through the night and finally decided to get up at 8am and get ready for both Basketball and the working day. I copied a whole heap of TV shows onto my memory stick so I would have something to occupy the hours while waiting around for the work I had to do to "run" on the Mass Spectrometer and headed off to Basketball. Last weekend we managed a win and booked a place in the finals...fourth place :) So this week we get to play again and go for a place in the grand final ... but against the team that is first and 14 points clear on top of the table and beaten us on all but one occasion in about 6 meetings. However, rather than type out a blow by blow of each half lets just cut to the chase. Today we WON!!

The kids played the best game of the season and truly were awesome. We were down by 8 points at half time even after a blitzing start where we were winning 7-0 in a matter of minutes. The half ended with us trailing 11-19. The second half was absolutely amazing to watch, my kids just didn't give up and had a really solid defense causing the other team to turn the ball over time and time again. With about 5 minutes to go in the final half the score was 23 -24 with the other team in foul trouble with 8 fouls already. Then we hit the "free" zone, whenever the 9th or greater foul in a half happens the fouled team gets 2 free shots at the basket. The last 3 minutes of the game must've lasted about 10 min ... it was hard to not be excited as we drew further and further in front.... with a minute to go we were 11 points clear due to so many fouls by the other team. The game ended with a score of 35-28 WE ARE IN THE GRAND FINAL BABY!!!!


After that tremendous victory and a super start to the day it all was about to head downhill as I had to high tail it over to work and spend the rest of the day there :(
I was the only person there in Chromatech (The department I work in) and it was quite disheartening as the area is about the size of an Olympic swimming pool + a bit more and very boring by myself. The reason that I was there was because I had taken off Monday-Wednesday this week to spend with Rachel while she was in Melbourne and had delegated the stuff I would have been doing to my underling Yi. He was very excited to be doing something new and eager as a beaver but, true to form, the Mass Spec broke on Monday just when we needed it the most. With me not there to fix it...it stayed broken until Thursday when i arrived back at work. I spent all day Thursday getting it working in a "Semi-repaired" state. We used it Friday morning but just before lunch it broke again and I spent the remainder of the day trying to "triage" it into a working state. I left work at about 7pm after running out of "Fix" options and just hoping that by letting it run overnight (It needs a very high vacuum to operate which takes about 6 hours to pump-down) it would be usable on Saturday morning.

Luckily it seemed alright except for a small air leak that was identified on Thursday but we couldn't find to fix. I ran some tests and it game results that were "usable" but not optimal. Nothing I could do about that though. So I put in a solid 7 hours there today. Luckily for me at one point the company owner dropped in and saw me working...more Brownie points for me :). I had to do my grocery shopping on the way home and rushed to the only supermarket I knew would be open and bought some things for lunches for the coming week. I also seem to have aquired a new taste for all things "honey" (Cheers Rach) and bought another tub of "Honey Buzz" yoghurt. I just thought i'd mention that because I have had a psychological barrier to honey flavored yoghurt for EVER and always assumed it would taste crap...How wrong I was...especially when poured over fresh chopped fruit (cheers again Rach ;) )

Now I am home and after not having eaten all day I think I deserve Indian for dinner. Worlds best Garlic Naan and possibly a nice spicey vindaloo I am thinking. That should end the day on a good note.

Tomorrow I am back at work all day again and I am seriously already looking forward to the 29th of September when I get another day off from this crap. I can't wait until this project is OVER...it's sucking my will to live !!!

Extremes.

I find it hard to believe sometimes just how crap my job can be and how this can affect a person. This week started off as brilliant as brilliant could be, mainly because I took three days off from this place and had Rachel visiting to boot. Now here I am on Friday just 5 days later and I am at the absolute opposite end of the happiness scale. I've returned to work yesterday to find NOTHING I had delegated to get done on my days off had been done due to the Mass Spectrometer breaking. As a consequence of that, the project is now behind by those 3 days. We had a meeting at 3pm yesterday to see where things stood with a delivery we have to fill by the end of next week and I left that meeting knowing (or so I thought) what was going on. This morning I find myself as a passenger on an email train from our R&D director about what HE thinks is happening that bears no resemblance at all to what the Product manager's and I decided was possible. To make matters even more confusing I seem to have got onto this email train 7 stops into the journey and see that this conversation has been going for almost 2 weeks already before I am included in it and then it's only to say how badly F@#ked up everything seems to be because the work we actually ARE doing on this project doesn't conform to the absolutely impossible promises the people in management have made to the customers . In this same email I am now informed that I don't have a weekend to look forward to either and I will be in here all day on Saturday and Sunday working to meet the unmeetable time-lines using a machine that is functioning at about 50% because I can't afford the time to take it off-line to fix it so it works at 100% .... ludicrous. Add on top of that the psychological torture of knowing that Rachel is in the same city and i'm not able to see her again before she leaves to go back home and you might understand what sort of state I am in at the moment. Not happy Jan!

Why can't every Friday be like last Friday?

Booooooooo Hiss Boo!!

Well here we are on Wednesday night after 5 days with Rachel in Melbourne. I've been in Melbourne now for about 4.5 years and have NEVER had such an awesome weekend as I just had with Rach. Let's just leave it at that because there are just far too many highlights and good times to recount here and I'm sure there will be a flood of photos to see when Rachel gets home and uploads them. We went exploring nature, running from storms, shopping, out dinners, in dinners, out breakfast, in breakfasts, Pancake hunting, Basketballing and acting like a couple of teenagers. We laughed a lot, talked a lot and slouched around in unison.We both also will now always have an appreciation for "Lounge Music" thanks to Mr. Richard Cheese (I'm listening to him now while typing this. Google him!!).

Unfortunately (for me) my allocated "Rachel in Melbourne" time expired today after a nice day in the city eating cake on Southbank and wandering the riverfront in the sunshine. I'm back home now at a bit of a loss as to what to do with myself. I got so used to having you around Rach that it just feels wrong now that you're not here anymore. Melbourne sucks just that little bit more for me. The bright side is that i'll be back in Adelaide in 3 weeks so the fun can continue then.

So thanks again Rachel. You absolutely rock ... Two thumbs up, but you knew that already.