I have never liked Sunday nights. As far back as when I was going to UT and I used to go to Crystal City more often, Sundays meant coming back to Austin and being alone. Fast forward a couple years and Girlfriend has become Wife, but she has to work on Monday mornings. Since I ended up in nightshift over twenty years ago, I used to be off Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, but what was the fun, when your partner works when you are off? Over the years, I finally was able to move my working days to Monday through Friday which is what everybody works, but since my hours are at night, it still meant that I could stay up Sunday nights, and again, I find myself with no companions, so I must still say it sucks, a little bit. With Wife working three hours away, there we are every Sunday afternoon, she does not like driving at night and I don't blame her, but that means she leaves around 3-4 right now to get home as it is getting dark, as the days get longer she may stay later, but eventually she still has to go, even in the summer.
To add insult to injury, as they say, this week I start my training days, so I am off Monday nights, I even forgot that four hours ago, when I came up to my bedroom to try to write this before midnight and go to bed early. I woke up at 2:30am, scared and still not written more than what you see now. Boy woke me around midnight, he had worked a double shift Saturday and Sunday, so he was not around the last two days. Saturday, he went in and stayed at work until 1am, and Sunday he went in at 11am, and worked until midnight. I feel bad that he has to work the shitty weekend hours, but he is off during the week to do whatever for school, and this semester he doesn't have classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Plus, he is young, I have worked a twelve hour shift over twenty years, he can do two days and bounce right back.
Getting back to me, I should be fully trained in a month or so, and it can't come soon enough, as the big contract that has me snooping around chemistry is supposed to start sending work this week. The practice run took us over four hours to digest and prep the samples, meaning to take the samples and turn them into liquid form from solid BBs. Thursday was the first time I had done that, and it was intense. Drop a couple drops of acid from measured out vials onto a known mass of BBs and wait on the reaction to settle down. We keep pouring from the acid mixture, until all 30-40ml are poured in, up until the last bit is poured, there will be a very aggressive plume of orange smoke coming from the reaction, thankfully it is done in a vacuum hood, so it sucks all the smoke and smells out. This work only gets you to the analysis part which will then take another 3-4 hours. Five samples does not sound like much, but we double the samples, to repeat the data, add in a baseline every 2-3 samples, so we end up with about 15 samples, which then need another 5 samples for a calibration curve and 4 samples for checks we do on the tool every six samples, plus a blank sample in between each sample, and we double everything because we run it at two different power settings, so 5 samples turns into almost 100 runs in the ICPMS tool, and that can take 5-6 hours to run through the tool.
If the customer promised 5 samples a day, this is work enough for a whole new employee, but we are going to try and just fit the work in with the crew that we have, considering they were almost overwhelmed last year when just their previous customers were sending too much work.
I am hoping to be swimming in so much overtime, that even my boring Sunday nights that I have always hated will be turned into money making evenings. This would be a way to turn my lemons into lemonade.
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