The Beauty Within

I’m finally settling into my work now, getting better at not making mistakes, and just becoming more efficient.  Due to the nature of my work, it is really true that the more you do, the more you learn.  One of the biggest and probably hardest things to learn is how to troubleshoot machines.  Our machines are well, a tad fickle, and they sometimes think it’s fun to act up.  Part of the job (that’s not written) is learning how to deal with those problems, and how to fix the machines until the process is completed, or what to do when the machine just totally stops working while it’s still in the middle of a process.

How do we learn that?  By being “SBOM”, which stands for this fancy title of “Southern Blotting Operations Manager.”  All of us rotate on a daily basis, because it could get extremely tiring to do it every single day.  Basically we respond to machine alarms, and we also have to check on machines that don’t alarm (we have an older type that’s built in-house, and a newer type with a fancy computer system and touch-screen monitor that’s built by a contractor).

These machines will alarm when certain things needs to be done, like placing the gel weight, placing the membrane (which isn’t hard but it is time consuming), and if the machine itself detects an anomaly.  For me, the most tiring portion is placing in all the membranes (for those who don’t know Southern Blots, basically denatured single-stranded DNA is transferred from an agarose gel onto a membrane, and the membrane is then hybridized with DNA probes, which will flouresce when the probes find a complementary strand).  You have to squat up and down to check the bottom chamber of the machine, which really takes a toll on my knees (that was injured back in May).  Plus you just can’t concentrate on whatever you happen to be doing, because when an alarm goes off, you have to hurry over to it to silence it and see what needs to be done.

So anyhow.. at first I was assigned to be SBOM on Fridays only.  Last week however, the training supervisor told me that soon another new trainee and I will be assigned 2 days of SBOM work per week.  Like I said above, the more you respond to the alarms, the more you learn of its various problems and how to troubleshoot it.  That’s all fine and dandy, until I saw the schedule.

I was SBOM on both Thursdays and Fridays, both considered BUSY DAYS.  I was already SBOM on Fridays, so I know the pace of it.  But Thursdays?  Thursdays are pure hell.  For some reason, Thursdays are just really busy in our department.  Wednesday is pretty bad too, but it’s not like we don’t have slow days.  Mondays and Tuesdays are certainly slow.

Since the other new trainee has Mondays, I was thinking that perhaps I’ll get Tuesday, so we’ll each have a slow day and a busy day.  How wrong was I?  Yesterday alone I placed 14 membranes, and today, I placed 10.  My knees are seriously KILLING me, and I barely get any work done.  Yesterday was to a point that I almost cried because I was sooo physically exhausted, and my mind was fried from chasing down alarms.  And of course on both days machines just had to do misbehave.  It was literally hell..

Anyhow.. enough complaining and ranting.  I’m going to have hot pot with my hubby and my sister tonight, and tomorrow, I’m going to have a relaxing bubble bath.  Oh yea, and I got paid today, so WOOT WOOT!