Working Woman's Blues

I'm on 3rd shift this week. I actually started the week on 1st shift Monday morning and came in for 3rd shift Monday evening (our 3rd shift person still has problems so can't work). Ever tried to change your sleeping schedule from 8:30 PM - 3 AM to 9 AM - 4 PM in one day?

This all came about because my boss has no clue plans were changed between Friday when I left work and 9 AM Monday (after I had been at work for 4 hours).

So the change of plans entailed running the growth machine this week and conducting an experiment. I got the machine going Monday night and everything seemed to go smoothly until I went to seed it tonight (don't ask, it's way to complicated to explain and it's proprietary info anyway). Anyway, I went to turn the argon level down and found that we were almost out of argon.

AAAARRRRGGGG! Monday we seemed to have plenty at over 200 psi in the tank. Now there is about 1 psi in the tank. There was nothing to do but shut the machine down. Even if we got an emergency delivery, it wouldn't do any good for this week because of the amount of time between starting the machine and seeding it.

After the machine cooled off, I started cleaning the water system in conjunction with polishing fibers. The polishing machine did not shut off after 270 seconds, as it is suposed to. That is not exactly true, part of it shut off, but the other part stayed on. This was not disasterous for the sapphire fiber being polished, but certainly was for the aluminum plate that the polishing paper is placed on. To make a long (and incoherent) story short, the $500 aluminum plate is trashed.

The boss is going to be so happy in the morning when he gets in! I think I'll stay on 3rd shift for the rest of the week to avoid him And I guess I'll be on 3rd shift next week too!