Nearly five years ago I arrived here as a post-doc, fresh and wide eyed out of graduate school. I knew my group had admins and techs, but I had no idea what they did. I was used to doing everything myself and so went about that the next few years. Admin were there to tell me how to do things (like use the laminator) and techs were there to tell help me find the missing 9/16” wrench.
Something happened though along the way.
Yesterday I sat with a Swagelok catalog in front of me, I looked at all the options. Then I reminisced about those days when I used to work on that big project and there were drawers of fittings. I would take my tube over and scrounge until I made things work. Now I have my own project and no drawers and drawers of fittings to rummage around (without someone getting extremely irritated with me).
I flipped around the catalog some, feeling a little lost, NPT, VCR, Cajon, what do I need? I spent five minutes at this and then decided it just wasn’t worth my time. I have a mechanical engineer who can do this. I e-mailed him my requirements and a charge code.
Later yesterday I got a phone call telling me I have a file on a hard drive that is being sent out. Oh, that means I would need to walk over to the other building across the street. “Let me give you a charge code to do that for me and put it on a cd,” I told the admin. “No problem,” she replied.
Yes, I’ve gone soft. I cannot live without admin and technical support.
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