Today I was back on the ranch in Ruby Valley for a few minutes. I guess that I had some bad/good experiences with equipment breaking/dying on me and those around me.
I thought that when I got to my science lab in Vegas that I wouldn't have to deal with things like that. Well it turns out that even in the science lab you still have to fix things and get them going. I have had terrible trouble with two separate pieces of equipment here in Vegas (Atomic Absorber, and hot water bath/circulator). Both of these machines aren't cheap. They aren't as costly as tractors for farm use are but they are still up there 50,000 and 5,000.
So with the hot water bath it just had its computer system get totally fried by gaseous acid coming off a certain experiment we do. We do it a lot and well the bath died. Luckily when we dropped 5,000 on a new one we got one that had a setup protecting from the gaseous acid for this future experiments. So that wasn't to bad, it did take almost 3 months to get that taken care of however which really put me way behind schedule.
The Atomic Absorber on the other hand has been far worse a nightmare. For me it worked pretty well for several months then a coolant hose wore out on me. Well that was easy enough to fix. Then later another hose died on me. This one was deep in the instrument and so I really had to tear the machine apart to get to it. It got fixed and then putting it back together the auto sampler that picks up the samples wouldn't work for some reason. That was two months and 3,000 dollars ago.
Fast forward to today. I got the repaired auto sampler back. I get it all hooked up and things are looking like they will run well (this is when I get the old ranch feeling of this is to good to be a permanent thing). I start up the machine and I smell something faintly burning. This is a bad smell in a scientific lab. In a tractor you don't really worry, in fact it almost had to be on fire to really be worthy of a problem. Well I thought maybe some coolant that I wasn't able to get cleaned up earlier was burning or evaporating off with a bit of it burning. This was actually a faint hope, but I actually believed in it for a short time.
Well I turned it off and cleaned it up and then I started it up again. Because I had to run the thing so off it went. Good feelings were gone when the burning smell started twice as bad almost as soon as I turned the machine on after 2 hours (this means that something was burning regardless of the machine being warmed up or not :(). So I turned it off. I told my boss and he was pretty sad/mad/pissed all in one. I tell him things because he needs to know what is happening, not because he actually knows how to fix anything at all. So I called the repair rep (he gets $325 and hour if he comes out) to get an idea of what was happening. He gave me a few scenarios. Basically I needed to get out the torch and start singing that old song that goes "burn baby burn!!... Well I invited my old friend over who has had more unhappy times with the AA than even me and my professor over. We started it up and it was smoking again before it had been on for 10 seconds. That was not a good thing. So we possibly can now fix it for about $15,000 to $20,000 dollars. That is definitely an un-cheap price.
The good part was that since I had my camera I took picture of the broken thing and will send them to the Repair man to see what he thinks. Basically my professor just has to be sure of whatever it means before he can deal with the problem. I wish I could have know this would happen 5 months ago when these problems had started that this may be how the poor beast ended. In my case the hay is in the field rotten and we never even hardly got it cut...
Surprising as this sounds I am a pretty happy person today. Maybe I am just one of the odd ones that is indefatigably optimistic... It really isn't my machine and this is creating bonds with the professor that will last a really long time. He won't forget me, for good or evil. Anyway, that is what has going for me the last few days.
I guess what really made my day was coming home to hot wings and tending some pretty cute little girls with my wife. For me this was great because I didn't have time for a pity party that I wasn't interested in. Now I am excited about tomorrow. I left that junk at the office, and it will stay there until Monday.
Thinking about that, on Tuesday I think that I will head out on a little camping trip (little is only 4 or 5 days by the way). This is how I deal with stress...
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