To be fair, when he did the gas line installation, it worked fine. Shame neither of the GCs did until about a year after I left, when the youngest GC (7 year old at this point) was fixed. Odd that Varian couldn’t resolve the issue with their GC, though.
Windows 98SE on a Pentium 3 processor, fast when it came out; in the age of dual- and quad-core processors, slower than my calculator. Also, loading applications from a server that’s situated no more than 12 feet away shouldn’t take a number of minutes to do.
This gives you an idea of how much I was enjoying my job back then. This isn’t a conversation I’ve had. More of these next week, with random stuff probably appearing over the weekend.
I always expected this to happen when doing Loss on Drying. Imagine how disappointed I was when it didn’t.
And this is what happens when I’m left to think about a conversation. To be fair, I think this is close to where it could have gone, knowing the people involved
The numbers may have been different, but this conversation actually took place.
I’m currently trying to find work in IT, doing desktop support and similar. It’s very frustrating, I don’t have much experience, and that which I do have is all from ad hoc support that I’ve provided to my colleagues in the labs (or my friends and family).
It seems that no employer wants to train someone up to fit the roles they have available to fill. This is kind of understandable, given the possibility of the trainee moving on as soon as training is complete rendering the whole escapade a rather costly waste. However, if this is legal (employment law is a little outside my area of expertise), setting out minimum terms of service in the employee’s contract would mitigate this somewhat – the employee would have to stay with the company for a fixed time, say 2 years (which I’ve seen with employees getting Degrees with day-release from the employer), and if they leave before that time, then the employee will be responsible for a pro-rata amount of the costs incurred in training them.
At the moment, job hunting feels like this:
thelabratory 