Superdex™ 75 columns are large, expensive and easily-broken pieces of kit.
S75 column, in intensive care
We have two in the lab. We use them in the last step of protein purification protocols. More often than I would like, this step is not 'polishing' but 'getting rid of a lot of crap'. Unfortunately, these columns do not respond well to a lot of crap, as it tends to stick to them, meaning they go yellow and icky, and simply do not work. Two weeks ago I discovered that one of the S75s was knackered and spent a couple of days making it better before I could use it for my own work.
This morning I found that Don Quixote was having trouble with the second, so I stepped in to lend a hand (seeing as I lived and breathed the bloody things for six years at the MRC-LMB, I'm probably best placed to fix them).
The Column Whisperer, earlier today
A crowd gathered, the screens were drawn, expletives were prepared... And after an entire morning of fiddling, and the afternoon making sure it was all right (during which time I edited a student's thesis), the column is back in business, better and lower back-pressured than ever before. I am a hero.
But it's not the kind of thing that fits easily into my yearly review, nor indeed does it translate to papers.
Comments
And isn't that the way of it? The guy who got us all back online yesterday through his cell phone a full eight hours before the IT folk(s?) did is another one of those unsung heroes through whom proper science really gets done - or at least one's antibodies ordered...
Posted by: Alethea | October 23, 2008 01:12 AM
This is kind of related to one of the points I'm trying to make in an as of yet unfinished blog post: the people who have done the most troubleshooting probably have more useful work experience than the people for who (whom?) everything worked on the first try, but it's the people who never run into any technical problems who get to publish first and get the job/money/credit.
Posted by: Eva | October 23, 2008 08:21 AM
Well done you. Right up there with the brave soul that once upon a time, unplugged an X-ray developer that had become fouled because some twit put, I kid you not, a hockey card in it.
Posted by: Ricardipus | October 25, 2008 04:47 AM
Just call me Samwise.
Posted by: bk | October 28, 2008 12:52 PM
Quoting Eva: "it's the people who never run into any technical problems who get to publish first and get the job/money/credit"....
I haven't met many of those...in fact, the folk who do best out of our labs in terms of getting good postdocs/jobs are the ones that can seriously troubleshoot: everything from why the ELISA isn't working to why the HPLC is spraying the lab with buffer.
Posted by: ed rybicki | October 31, 2008 12:32 AM
If it is any consolation (or not), Richard, it is not just science that has this "feature".
I'm an office monkey. I tend to be the person that my teammates turn to with anything technical on the computery side ("Do you know how to...", "Can you squish a pdf to...", "The printer...") and I've never gotten that mentioned in my performance review.
But it is not just about kit-fixing, is it? There was a study by HP of office dynamics (Email as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within Organizations) that showed that some people in the office were focal points of information and knowledge, which other people relied on for their jobs running smoothly. As the paper puts it "Despite their lack of official recognition, informal networks can provide effective ways of learning, and with the proper incentives actually enhance the productivity of the formal organization".
PS If you preview and then try to post, computer says no. Or rather, wait a bit.
Posted by: Scott K | February 1, 2009 11:35 AM
Mmm. It's clear that people like you (and me) do benefit the organization, even without the incentives. It'd be nice to have the recognition though, wouldn't it?
And yeah. Commenting here is troublesome. Sorry—I've tried to get IT to do something about it but...
Posted by: bk | February 2, 2009 10:51 AM