.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Why I am unique, and how my environment affects this.

Friday, August 19, 2005

My job post, as promised

What do I do, in real life? Other than bitch, whine, and complain which I excel at. Too bad no-one wants to pay me to do that for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. After all, I did learn from the best. I am formally trained as a chemist, of the Inorganic type. This means I disdain any organic molecule (unless it contains a metal), refuse to repeat such things as: Diels-Alder, SN2, SN1, E1, E2, hydrogenation, dehydrohalogenation, Grignard, etc. You get the point. Those reactions are too smelly, and not near hazardous enough. Well, except for the entire drying of the solvents, thing. Those big stills are pretty cool. I mean, how is refluxing 5 liters of THF over sodium wire and benzophenone not a cool thing? Especially when you add some THF that has formed some peroxides over the exposed sodium wire, because someone in lab has been slacking on their still-refilling duties, I mean, how cool is that? Also, at my Graduate school, there was a legend (true) about this guy who was using NaK alloy in the still, and their was a little accident that turned him into a human torch. Wow. There is dedication for you. He actually returned and finished his degree. But anyway. One can still play with stills and use metals at the same time. Then you can also play with toxic, heavy metals, which are really cool. This is what I did. But now, I primarily use vibrational spectroscopy. You name it, I know it. General IR and Raman techniques. Specialized IR and Raman techniques. etc, etc, etc. This is also why I have so much down-time. I get samples, I run them, I analyze the data, I write the report, I go on-line and update my blog. Sometimes I get to travel to exotic locations and do it. Exotic locations like New Jersey and New York state. Anyway. That's what I do. Which is also why I am so geeky. It is an occupational hazard. I don't play RPGs though. I have never owned a polyhedral dice. I have never attended a Con, even though they do sound like fun. I never learned Klingon, programming, or HTML properly. I love my tech gadgets, I love Sci-Fi, I love science and I LOVE math. I still think the space shuttle is cool. I try to find other geeks like myself and bond with them. Other than that, I am me. And that is my job.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"refuse to repeat such things as: Diels-Alder, SN2, SN1, E1, E2, hydrogenation, dehydrohalogenation, Grignard"

I dunno girl - sounds like you might be a closet o-chemist... no true inorganic chem would come up with more than, say, three reaction types (imho). And that list was probably just off the top of your head! :)

8/22/2005 12:34:00 AM

 
Blogger Pavlina said...

Well, that is true. But I did duty as an organic synthetic chemist as well. So I actually used some of them, then I did work as an organometallic chemist, so I am contaminated. I hang my head in shame.

9/07/2005 02:10:00 PM

 

Post a Comment

<< Home