they’re not as cold as yours

[tiltingheartand]

Non-exhaustive list of things I hate:
- packing
- making so many goddamn decisions in such a short amount of time, Jesus Christ al-fucking-mighty
- my brain
- the inability to describe how my brain feels when I’m feeling off as anything but “... weird”
- (without fail, every time I try and fail to use any other word, I hear Leonard McCoy saying “you mean I have to die to discuss your insights on death?” which doesn’t help much)



On the bright side (well, possible bright side anyway, I’m working on it), I hadn’t realized that the PA I’m seeing at my neurologist’s now (the other one is off getting married and honeymooning et cetera) didn’t know I work third shift, and when she found out she absolutely lost her shit, so now I have an Actual Medical Note saying it is Medically Necessary for me to work first shift.

Which is fine, I just don’t know if I want to. I know it’s better for me, sleep schedule circadian rhythm blah blah blah, and I worked out the pay difference (third shift makes $1.25 extra an hour) and it’s not a super-lot especially after taxes, I just.

I don’t know. I like working four days a week. I like working nights when there’s not a lot of people around. I like actually doing lab work. But it seems like paperwork is where I’m headed, speaking purely practically, and one of my bosses has assured me that she knows I’d be good at it.

But this was my dream job. Like literally, people asked me in high school and college, what’s your dream job, and I said “I want to be a lab monkey in a corner somewhere that I don’t have to deal with people”. And that’s exactly what this is. So. Fuck. I don’t know.

Comments

[delight]

I feel you 100% here. ♥

And I think so long as it isn't physically dangerous, there's nothing wrong with doing lab work. I think they should find a space for you to do lab work on first shift, even if maybe my belief does not make it so (or necessarily even possible).

[tiltingheartand]

At this point it’s not even so much the safety that’s an issue as it is the fact that I can’t drive, which means my schedule is entirely fixed (since at the moment my mom picks me up, we go home, she gets ready, and then she goes to work, so I can stay like maybe fifteen minutes extra at the absolute most), and HPLC, which is what I wanted to be doing, is kind of hard to do like that. Ideally it’s fine, but there’s potentially a lot of troubleshooting, so if something went wrong with an hour left in my shift and I knew it would take at least an hour and a half to fix, it means pushing it off until my next shift, whereas someone else could just stay the extra time and finish it and then possibly move to something else later. I’ve been running heparin assay for the last few months, which is peculiar in a lot of ways, one of them being that I know approximately how long things take and they’re not nearly as time-consuming as some HPLC runs, so I can get a decent amount of that done, but I was supposed to be off heparin ages ago. And also I’m not trained on the instrument we’ve ~committed~ to using.

(Although the safety was a concern, at least to some; my last supervisor told me at one point that she’d try to walk past the GC lab once or twice a night to make sure I hadn’t fallen over or anything, and I just let that go instead of reacting the way I wanted to. Usually I’m more or less okay. The days I’m not I just go tell my supervisor “I feel weird so I’m going to review all night” or “my hands are disgustingly shaky, I have no business pipetting lidocaine, I’m reviewing all night” or whatever.)

♥