May this knowledge serve you well.

----

So I've finally gotten back on track as a writer/editor for U9R, which took a hit after our lead artist's harddrive tanked and crashed without any back-ups..but we're making progress and I'm periodically saving my Word files every 11.3 seconds.

Mostly I've been doing a relaxation/recovery thing, consisting of playing Morrowind: Bloodmoon, rediscovering the original X-COM, writing, sending out application bits and plotting what to do with Christmas. I may not be a Christian, after all, but I like twinkly lights and (non-alcoholic) egg nog. Ye gods I drank 5 quarts of that stuff within a two day period last year.

Gran has put an unspecified amount of money in my account. I figure if I can get up the energy to give a damn, perhaps I can guilt-trip my estranged father and relatives into contributing--y'know, for my application fees to all the graduate schools.

If you can't con your relatives for money, after all, just what in the hell kind of civilization do we have?

But all in all nothing has crashed and burned. Friends are friends, family is family, possible holiday hang-out excursions are--well, you get the point.

----

But speaking about crashing and burning, let me tell you about the lab.

When last we left our intrepid, unemployed and largely clueless lab monkey, he had returned home from a lab holiday party. His liver industriously sang and danced with 8 glasses of wine, a glass of cognac, two ales and patridge in a pear tree. The world was good, the sky was clear, and somewhere a forgotten old man found the spirit of christmas inside a stripper's g-string. I think the spirit was trying to snag its 20 back.

But into this merry holiday world would came a very fanciful monkey indeed. I thought the land of Discordia (i.e. the lab) would settle down for winter break and go to sing carols or show-tunes. It did not.

Now, as y'all might remember, there was a button on the ECT machine called Big Candy--which is a bright red *SHOCK* button that's labelled, enigmatically enough, SHOCK. I figured that testing out the device and making sure that what parameters we'd keyed in were actually being outputed by the machine. That is to say, if I wanted 10,000 Volts of machine juice to fry me the fuck out of a moose or a greyhound bus, I goddamn well wanted exactly 10,000 Volts to come out.

So there I stood, pressing down on Big Candy. I'd done this twice when a small light--partly blocked by masking tape--briefly flashed. It read "viol.". At the time I wasn't quite sure why the machine would do this. Of course it probably meant "violation", but why? Well, to make a story both redundant and short, the machine began to smoke and emit a continuous "you fucked up" noise.

Normally I would sigh, walk into Dr. Zivago's office and mention this catastrophe. The problem was, he was in the middle of frantically trying to finalize grades (since finals week was last week). Apparently they had a complete idiot running the show this year. He was an ornery son of a bitch--moreso than usual, and by good sweet fuck I wasn't about to add THIS on top of it.

Funny enough, on Wednesday, I was just about to tell him the machine was screwy--when he just sorta randomly left for the day. At 11:30am. Some might think he had an important meeting. I of course knew better: there was no purpose to it.

I then decided I'd take matters into my own hands. I emailed the guy we'd gotten the ECT machine from--Dr. Lace--and asked if the machine had ever overheated and, if so, what we could do to appease it and make it work again. I then carted the thing up to our Shop Guy. He said he'd have a look at it in the next few days. I felt relieved knowing this.

It wasn't sometime until Wednesday night, though, that it occured to me: perhaps I should have asked Dr. Ziv about sending up a 6,000 USD piece of equipment to get inspected. At the time I figured it couldn't hurt, but I might have overstepped my bounds. I hadn't planned on breaking the news to him over email, but I had no choice. I explained myself, my decisions and the general status of things. I'd even previously sent an email to Shop Guy telling him NOT to look at the machine.

Dr. Ziv's response was fairly typical: "Never do something like this again without my permission!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

You'll notice how he doesn't specify what "this" is. He likes doing that alot.

Now, the pre-letter of recommendation me would have put on scary Goth music and shook as the false heavens caved in, to carve my soul like the regional layout of Starbucks. The post-letter of recommendation me, though, could sorta rationalize it and stay calm.

And so I came in on friday expecting a full debriefing and detailed chewing out. I even penned it in my 'to-do' list. When Dr. Ziv did come around I again apologized about sending the machine up to the shop. Apparently that was only a minor concern to him, though he was somewhat angry since the shop charged 260 bucks an hour. I already knew (and later confirmed) he was completely full of shit, but I did my best acting job of sounding awe-struck and naive.

What was his major malfunction and the reason he'd sent that email to me? What was the giant, sin-filled and god-defiling "this" he mentioned? It was something I hadn't even thought of as being improper:

I had emailed Dr. Lace--the guy we'd gotten the machine from--asking him if they'd had a similar problem. This would make him infere that we'd screwed up his device. Dr. Ziv was a little panicky, asking me "do you know what sort of a position this puts me in? I have to email this guy and say you're a complete fucking moron, that you don't know what you're talking about! What'd he say in the email?" I told him that Dr. Lace wanted to come in on Saturday to test an animal (since Dr. Lace apparently hadn't understood my detailed request for help). At hearing that, Dr. Ziv put his head between his hands dramatically and shook it.

So in essence I had majorly screwed up because I might have lost Dr. Ziv some face in the eyes of a colleague.

Now the reason behind that is actually extremely amusing. Dr. Ziv told me that the machine works perfectly fine. That was why he'd have to tell Dr. Lace I was incompetent. At hearing this I couldn't help putting on a "what in the fuck?" face when he wasn't looking.

I went back into the 'injection room', hooked in the main machine and tried turning it on. No dice. I told him this. He came in, raised his voice and said that I had to have the router unit plugged in to make it work, then moved back to his office. Of course, you didn't need to have the router unit hooked up. They both have their own power supply. I wasn't one to argue with him at the time, though.

So I hooked up both units, switched one on then informed him the ECT machine still didn't work. He came in, not saying much. I decided to go back to the corner office and work on our official proposal--the one that'd make it legal for us to even use that machine.

I heard him tinkering with it. The constant buzzing sound had come back, which was a vast improvement over the thing not turning on at all. He did roughly the same thing I'd done: flip the thing on, press on the panelling to stop the noise, turn the thing off, wait a few minutes, turn the thing on and off again in rapid succession, etc. He exclaimed "God damnit" a couple of times. It didn't do wonders for my esteem.

For the rest of the day he didn't seem mad at me (any more than he usually seems). Eventually I asked him about what I should send to Dr. Lace as an email reply and if he (Dr. Ziv) wanted to do it instead...in light of that whole needing to explain I was a "complete fucking moron". This time around Dr. Ziv told me to do the exact same thing I'd already done: email the guy and ask if the situation had ever occured, and if so if he could come down. I even wrote the email and asked Dr. Ziv if he wanted to proof-read it. He grunted and said "No, no I wouldn't." It seemed as if finishing grades was still occupying his time and temper.

So, in essence, I think he overreacted because he assumed the machine worked fine--then largely dropped the issue when he saw that I'd taken a reasonable course of action. I admit I was wrong in doing all that without at least consulting with him. I could have waited. However:

1) The holidays are coming up and alot of people will be taking time off after Christmas Eve.

2) Dr. Ziv was working on grades and leaving early, so I didn't want to burden him.

It might be that he also didn't appreciate my co-opting his power. Indeed, I sometimes get the vibe that he feels threatened by me. To be honest I'm still not sure what I can/can't do and just what sort of position or power I do have. Being his senior staff member, I sometimes expect that we should work as equals on some problems. As it stands, though, I believe he wants me on an exclusively subordinate level and getting his word to finalize things. I'm perfectly fine with that--takes some of the responsibility off me--just wish I'd known before the ECT machine fiasco.

As it stands, we're expecting Dr. Lace to come in Wednesday to take a look at the thing. It'll probably be at some Godless hour of the morning like 7am, but if he can somehow fix the machine then I'm fine with it. If the guy can't, we still have Shop Guy at our disposal. And if that doesn't work, I can always consult the instruction manual (which I hope Dr. Lace has), or-- as a last resort--learn to speak some German to get a hold of the technical support line for the machine manufacturer.

----

Are you at all surprised all of that happened? I'm not. It only phases me slightly. This whole ECT thing has been floundering from the beginning. You might think that's self-pitying, but honestly: not a single thing has gone right or smoothly with the whole thing.

Still, I've sketched out a series of experiments we can do that'll net us alot of cash if they work out. I'm guessing Dr. Ziv will read over the first paragraph of my proposal, say something like "no no" or his famously indignant "stop". He'll then point out something utterly superfluous that has no bearing on the proposed experiments. He did that the last time Hara-Kiri and I tried to talk with him about getting some experiment designs down.

----

I know, I know, you can feel the love swelling with every paragraph. Well I appreciate your reading through my latest Discordia episode.

I'm in decent spirits overall. I get to see Selene and The Captain again soon, take off a goodly amount of time between Christmas Eve and New Year's, finish off my applications for graduate school...and sleep in.

----

Speaking of sleeping in, I've been feeling much more tired and sore lately. I wasn't quite sure what was up until about two hours ago. I found myself coughing up this large phlegmy glob, the kind you get when you've got the flu. I almost never get sick anymore, but I'm thinking this might be that killer Colorado flu. I seem to have some symptoms, but it isn't phasing me. It's just harder to breathe and I feel achy and tired. I think it's the closest to a hang-over I've ever gotten.

----

Regardless, tomorrow is a day off. A day to sleep in. A day where the fanciful lab monkies in Dr. Zivago's pockets remain caged and silenced in the land of Discordia, if only for a little while.

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