After waiting for a whole week, just to get my turn at the SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope), I arrived at the Research lab with my precious little samples, well ahead of time so as not to waste a single minute of my booked 3 hours! .....no...it's not plenty of time to get work done.....these high resolution imaging stuff takes ages for a scan!
And if I don't manage to extract all the information I need within this 3 hours, it might be another week before I can find an available time slot to continue my work, the SEM seems to be in very high demand.
So the person who's responsible for the SEM, let's call him Dr. H, was kind enough to explain to me how it all works before he began scanning the samples for me. And again no....we are not encouraged to 'do it ourselves' with this sophisticated piece of equipment which is worth $$ big bucks $$!!! So there's this Dr. H who operates it for us.
So, all was good and we were just about an hour into our work, took some images of the sample surfaces and was getting into the more interesting and important part of the work when suddenly the computer got stuck!!!
hmm...ok, so he did what he would normally do, shake the mouse a bit....sit patiently for a while....shake it again.................no response.......Esc.......Enter.......shake the mouse again (this time a bit impatiently) and now the mouse was also stuck!!! .....now that's weird....
When we came to the point of realization that the shaking is not going to work, we had to Ctrl+Alt+Del; once,...twice.......thrice....still nothing..........so Dr.H got really impatient and he kept pressing hard down on the keys till it shut down!
And then restarted it...but this time it wouldn't log in! The computer has gone seriously bananas!!!!
And it's not just a stand-alone computer, it's linked to the SEM, so we had to abandon my work!!!!!!
And my precious samples are still stuck inside the SEM! and they will have to stay there until some service people come down and figure out how to fix the system. Grrrr!!!**&&^# I wonder when that's going to be.
The SEM has been functioning very well for the last couple of months and just my luck it decided to crash right now!!!??!!
4 comments:
Sounds interesting at the same time annoying too..
yeah...and to add to the matters, I just found out yesterday that Dr. H is sick and on leave this whole week!
hey sas! :) bad scene, its really annoying isnt it?
hey, me in aussie these days visiting my sis, got vishu's number from his blog, will call sometime :)
hi Ineshka,
Yes I'm utterly annoyed to the core!!!! finally after almost 2 weeks I managed to get the stuff out yesterday, and went straight to do some testing on it only to find out that we've run out of test material!!@&#!%!
Why the hell didn't anybody order some stuff when they were running out of it??!
Now I have to wait another 2 weeks to get that stuff delivered.
My supervisor's getting pretty annoyed too! :)
Luckily ..not my fault :)
anyway, great to hear u are in Aussie, but some thousands of miles away I think :D
Not coming down to visit Melbourne?
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