Random occurrence in lab today got me reminiscing. We have a UPLC/MS-MS instrument (triple quad) sitting on one of those nice combination pump enclosure/instrument benches. The pump enclosure part pretty much silences the noise from the rough pump (which for some damned reason is a friggin' monster on this instrument) and keeps everything OSHA-compliant as far as 8 hour noise exposure. Now, this enclosure has a fan to keep the pump cool and, well, the fan failed.
In grad school, this would have meant scrounging a fan up from some closet somewhere, and if that failed, setting a box fan near it until a fan from cheapasscrap.com came in (and inevitably failed 2 weeks after the 60 day warranty). This would be an unacceptable delay in productivity, and since the OSHA noise requirements don't count in an academic lab, we just left the pumps out in the open. Which gets to the second part of today's tale. To keep the pump happy we propped the door to the enclosure open, and people kept closing it because of the noise. The LC/MS scientist eventually had to put a note on the door. It made me think back to the days when we shut down all the pumps (due to planned power outage or maintenance) and how much silence there was. It also made me remember the constant headaches and general edginess associated with that type of sound exposure. It also brings back the memory of observing zero/first years when they first entered the lab and saw/heard what lengths one must go to in order to maintain that amount of truly research grade mass spectrometers. Oh the power of those instruments, how I wish I still had some time on those beasts of Purdue.
One of the UG interns accidentally threw me into the breach today. I'm half-assed trained on one of the normal HPLC's, but even though it's ancient by industry standards (I think it's 2006ish), it's new compared to what I've used (I used the 2003 version of it with 2001 software at Dow, and a completely different brand on 1999 software at Purdue). So, I can run it, I can keep it alive, but I fumble around on the software pretty hardcore. Well, the intern came by asking where the column for rosemary analysis, I dig it out and hand it over and she just kinda stared at me. Turns out by "where's my column" she really meant "I've never set up any of this before." Long story short, nothing blew up, samples were run and I learned a lot about the software under a somewhat stressful situation. Nothing worse than the n00b Ph.D. struggling to help the undergrad, worse yet is I realized how far behind the software I am. At least my chromatography tricks are still current, I guess that's the whole point of the degree. The Science is the hard part, the software is just seat time.
Industry definitely tests your multitaskability (my word, patent pending). But I like that challenge.
-J
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