I'd hammer in the morning

There are certain aspects of the job that I did not entirely expect. I envisioned it as mostly involving testing subjects and doing related sciency things. However, as everyone in the lab is a Science Person of some description, there are a lot of miscellaneous tasks that fall on me too. Unsurprisingly, some of it is administrative; lots of forms and billing, and my phone skills have already improved substantially (though my dread at having to use the phone has not quite kept pace with these improvements). However, it turns out that I am also very much a technician. A technician who mainly deals with intricate and unfamiliar pieces of equipment whose documentation is either helpful but incomplete or else hopelessly dense yet somehow uninformative (depending on whether or not the machine is one we built ourselves). So, for example, about a week or two ago they handed me a screwdriver, a three ring binder, and the vendor's business card and said "the Thermal Desorption Unit is broken. See what you can do."

The Thermal Desorption Unit, incidentally, is hands down the most impressively-named piece of equipment in the lab. Its function is relatively insignificant (if you must know, it soaks up chemicals and then releases them when heated, allowing you to squeeze the contents of 50 milliliters of vapor into a machine that can only process much smaller volumes), but doesn't it sound cool? I feel like I should be threatening Jabba the Hutt with this thing. I would be bluffing, of course, since it still doesn't work.