Things have been rough this week. I could rejoice and say how God has been good these last few months etc etc, which he has, but my honesty is too much for me to repress my true feelings about this past week like a good Christian should. (?)
I have been trying to work out the kinks and take all of the monstrous monkey wrenches out of a method I need to use, oh, a week ago. My plants have been ready to harvest for a week or so now, but since I don't have the method ironed out, I can't harvest them. Simple. Anyway, it involves evacuating all of the air out of little bitty roots using a vacuum pump. This process, which I still haven't figured out, can take, let's see, as long as you can sit in front of a vacuum and desiccator. After the first hour of sitting in front of the thing watching itty bitty bubbles come out of the root, you start to feel like Rainman staring at the dryer. However, it IS actually necessary for you to sit there because you have to do something to the apparatus every minute or so. I even brought in a novel one day to try to enjoy this, to no avail. The numbers were not coming out right at all, for example, -129% air in this root. For those of you who are not numerically inclined, that is physically impossible. Simple. So basically I have spent two weeks working on a method that tells me nothing worth a crap. Anyway, the shit hit the fan with mighty explosiveness yesterday when I went into the lab next door to see if they had a stronger vacuum pump. Usually labs will have "air", "gas", and "vacuum" attachments on their benches. Ours, being the ghetto shed that it is, doesn't. :) So I went next door, where another grad student was working. I asked her if they had 'vacuum' attachments. We found 4-5 of them on the side wall, where there are several built-in hoods. I tried turning one on. Nothing. I tried the 'air' valve. Nothing. I did not try the gas valve, because at this point, I was realizing that it was hard to know whether you had completely turned it off, and I didn't want poor Shazia to die from CO poisoning or something. Anyway, at the end of the row, there was a knob labeled "High Off Low". I tried turning this on. Nothing. At this point, I must have been distracted by something, but I left that knob at whatever setting it was at. (not "Off", unfortunately). I gave up my search for a vacuum attachment, because nothing in the lab seemed to be working whatsoever. I decided to call it a morning, called Dan and went to have lunch with him at his lab. After a tasty meal of stew and rice, I came back to my lab, only to be greeted by "Oh, THERE SHE IS!!" It was not my birthday, I didn't just earn my Ph.D. or anything spectacular, so I was worried about this being yelled at me by my labmates who had terror and amazement written on their faces. I smelled smoke. not good. Our lab almost burnt down a few months ago, and it smelled like a campfire for a while, so I KNOW this smell. All too well. They kindly informed me that a box in the hood (where I had been fiddling with knobs) had 'spontaneously' burst into flames. Apparently the knob for the built-in heating plate had mysteriously turned on after 15 years of unuse. Well, as you can guess, it wasn't so spontaneous or mysterious to me. The box was on top of the heating plate, so I couldn't see that at all. I went in the lab to apologize and humbly beg for forgiveness from the guy who ran that lab, and he was fairly nice about it, considering I had set on fire the box containing a $1000 (has now appreciated to $2000) scale from Switzerland.
At this point, I was not sure what to do. I had no idea how much the scale cost, but I know that they are not cheap. Hoping that there is some kind of insurance that could pay for that kind of accident, I just left after apologizing profusely (I make so many screwups I have had a ton of practice apologizing profusely). I thought all was well and that I was forgiven, but then the guy who ran the lab came to talk to my boss today to ask him to pay for it. The thing is, the scale still functions--sure some outside parts were singed a bit, but nothing that will affect the weighing. But no, he wanted my boss to pay for the damaged scale, which is when we found out that it actually had doubled in price. Great.
No, there is no happy ending to this story, yet. I don't know if the guy knows that it works OK, because he didn't even seem to want to clean it up and test it out (we did that). However, I'm hoping that he might shower me with mercy and decide that it works OK for now and tell us that we can just replace the two feet on the base that are not in good shape (melted into a black amoeba-like shape), which would cost us $66.00, rather than $2000.00.
Anyway, there's my update. Hopefully things can only get better from here. I'm scared to think what else might happen to make my life more eventful (blogworthy). I am definitely becoming wary of my uncanny ability to set things on fire. I did a similar thing at Calvin, creating molten aluminum by heating a 'heat-resistant' (apparently not) heating mantle. At least that was cool to see the red, lava-like stuff flowing out of the mantle. I didn't even see the flames this time (which I hear were spectacular), and now the campfire smell will be taunting me for the next while about how I just could have switched that stupid switch back to "off."