For the first time in ages, I found myself in the chemistry lab actually doing chemistry. I haven’t done solution preparation since I was in my second year of college (that was like 1999). So, being back in the lab, I found myself lacking confidence. Of course, I quickly regained it as it was basically just cooking, except with chemicals.

But, that is not what I wanted to write about.

I wanted to write about my Lab Notebook. It has very nice paper. Ink flows onto it smoothly. It has a rather nice feeling to write stuff in the book. While it is nothing exciting that is going into the book, it still feels good to write in it. It feels productive. I don’t often get to feel truly productive. Most things I do involve sitting behind the computer crunching numbers or running endless tests on my machines to get the numbers that I need to crunch. However, when I write things down in my Lab Notebooks, I really feel like I have something to show for my work. I know that all the work I do is about the same and really, what I’m writing in my Lab Notebooks is more or less trivial (lot numbers, serial numbers and formulations mostly) but it feels like it isn’t.

Lab Notebooks are all assigned a number and when they are filled, they are placed in the vault so everything that is done can be traced back to the notebook. This is to keep the FDA and other inspection agencies happy. In 50 years, the only real thing left that will have said that I was here will be those Lab Notebooks. The information stored on the company system will likely be gone and disappeared into the Ether, but those Lab Notebooks will be there, sitting in that vault as a reminder that work was done, trivial as it may be.

Posted by Utopia at June 6, 2006 10:06 AM

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