One of Those Days

We all have bad days every now and then. Monday was one of those days for me. Dennis and I both ended up working way too much over the weekend, so I wasn’t very happy about going to work anyway. I was planning to make breakfast cereal on the extruder in the pilot plant and I wanted to get an early start but that was not to happen. I procrastinated a few minutes at home watching CNN and then it took me a few minutes extra to get all the groceries loaded into my bike bags. I had done some grocery shopping for the lab over the weekend and had to haul the stuff to work.

So, I got to work schlepping the groceries and went to put them into the fridge in the lab. But the fridge was warm. WTF?! So, I found one of the techs and let her know that the fridge was on the fritz. We walked back to the lab and she just looked at it for a few seconds. Then, she picks up a big plug from the counter and says, “Isn’t this the plug for that fridge?” She plugged it back in and it immediately started running. OK, so I probably should have figured that out by myself, but who unplugged the fridge? It turned out that the electricians had gone through the labs on Friday evening to do a safety check and they unplugged everything. Maybe they wanted to save some energy, maybe they thought it was a solar powered fridge, or maybe – just maybe- they really are that dumb.

Next, I went to the pilot plant to see about starting the cereal project. The guy who runs the pilot plant told me that a customer was stopping by at 11:00 and he wanted me involved in the meeting. OK, so I’ll just start the cereal after lunch. I rescheduled with the people who were going to help me with the extrusion and got ready to meet the customer.

Naturally, the customer was late and we didn’t get started until 11:30. With no conference rooms available, they decided to meet in my office. They had to set up an overhead projector and point it to the wall. We used a couple of books to boost the picture over the tear in the wallpaper. Yeah, my office is a high-class joint! Finally, at 1:00, they took the customer to the cafeteria for lunch. I had no time for lunch because I still had cereal to make!

Back in the pilot plant, I finally got to make that cereal. Everything went pretty well except that it took too long. We finished about 5:00 and still had to clean up the huge mess. The cereal was the shape of Kix so the little round balls bounced and rolled all over the floor despite our attempts to keep them under control. Cleaning the extruder is usually pretty easy, but today there was a bunch of gunk burned on to the screw. I spent an extra half hour scrubbing it with a wire brush. I found out later that the people who used the extruder last had jammed it and then didn’t get it completely clean. Yuck!

I left work at about 6:00. It wasn’t raining, but it was pretty cold and windy, a nice head-wind for my bike-ride home. I am really ready for some nice spring weather.