Initial NREL Shenanigans

It's been a fun first week and a half at the lab, with various adventures at the laboratory.

Caleb the Security Guy

I got to know Caleb the security officer pretty well, which was fun. At NREL, all of the buildings are locked by keycard, so we need to beep in. My keycard didn't let me into any of the buildings I worked in until the end of the third day of work, so I always got to talk to Caleb on the Intercom. We developed a system:

*beep* [I press the intercom button]

"Hi this is Caleb at Security, how can I help you?"

"Hi, this is David Martin at the South entrance to the SERF..."

"Hello Mr. Martin, let me unlock that door for you. Have a good day."

"Thanks. You too Caleb."

It was almost tragic when my card started just letting me into the building. I haven't talked to Caleb since.

You can't have a monitor *wink*

At orientation, they said that as interns, we wouldn't have access to any of the fancy setup stuff that's available to other workers at NREL since we're only here temporarily. I beg to differ. After talking with Joe and borrowing things from five different scientists and purchasing a mouse, I had two monitors, a laptop, a keyboard, a desktop, two mice, and an external hard drive. Now that's how you science!

Sciencing in style!

I've since returned one of the mice, the desktop and the second monitor (I was just looking for a file), but it's still a pretty legit setup. I like it.

I tot's know what I'm doing. I got this bro.

So, I mentioned I'm taking measurements of the angle water makes on stuff (contact angle measurements as they say) and that I wrote a procedure for taking these measurements last year. I can't find that procedure. At the end of my internship last year I printed it, posted it in my dropbox, copied it to my laptop, copied it to an external hard drive, copied it to my flash drive, and gave it to Joe (my mentor/boss).

Since then, the paper has been lost, my laptop has been wiped, my dropbox got too full and automatically deleted it, I failed to copy the correct portion to my external hard drive, I lost my flash drive, and Joe changed computers and lost it (hence why I borrowed one of his old desktops in the above picture). Fortunately I remember the important parts of what I did, and I wrote a paper for the SULI program in which I wrote a paragraph on the procedure, so I can still do the measurements in a very similar way, there just might be a slightly different number of seconds between when I pull out the samples from the plasma cleaner and put them in the sonic cleaner.

Our Plasma Cleaner is in another Castle

(Not-so-subtle Mario reference)

I need access to a lot of different labs. Last year, I cleaned samples in the Organic PhotoVoltaic (OPV) lab in the SERF, initialized humidity and temperature measurements from the X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) lab in the SERF, and took contact angle measurements in the Field Test Laboratory Building (FTLB, another building). This year, the plasma cleaner I use was moved to the Process Development and Integration Laboratory (PDIL) in the Science & Technology Facility (S&TF, another building).

So, I needed certification to work in another laboratory to do the same stuff I was doing last year. I this happened today (the seventh day on the job) right before I left. I finally won Mario!