Teamwork

It's almost the weekend! This week has flown by at work. Things are pretty busy, but good. I go at my own pace most of the time, so I don't feel like someone is breathing down my neck waiting for me to finish so they can do something.

I did have sort of the opposite happen though. Something that can happen when four people are working on the same project. We are processing mosquitoes that had blood-fed, so one part of the project is for someone (not me) to dissect off the abdomen and analyze the blood to see what kind of animal it came from, and another part is for me to get the rest of the body, shake it in a tube with a copper BB and this liquid, and extract DNA to do my population genetics thing.

I've got a process that I've made little improvements on over the years. It's something that I can turn on a podcast or audiobook and chug through for a couple of hours and do what I need to do. Yesterday, I'm about 20 tubes into the process (out of about 100) and the numbered tubes in one box end with 393. The numbers in the next box start with 401. Hmmm.

I look in all the boxes again. I go downstairs and look in the freezer where the boxes of tubes are stored. I cannot find the tubes. I email my coworker and she says she'll try to find them. She's busy with other things, so I didn't hear from her for the rest of the day. I'll try to track down what happened and we'll figure out whether to just skip those, or wait and see if they can be located. It doesn't really matter. As long as the parts of an individual are in tubes with the same number, things will match.

Having just read this post, it's pretty boring, work related stuff. Ha! Oh well, more exciting things will be posted about the weekend. I'm thinking of dragging Mr W to a squaredance...