The moon, Walmart and chocolate pies

Let’s sail to the moon. Let’s go to Walmart for their chocolate pies.

Sometimes people will surprise you with the things that they say.

My co-worker and I were cleaning up the micro lab yesterday and I was talking about what we needed to do regarding compliance. QA/QC and compliance are my big demons in the lab. Of course, my mind twitters about at 100mph, coming up with lists and lists of things that need to be addressed. Because I have so much on my mind that needs to get done, I started rambling on and on about one thing and then another thing, giggling along the way because in some ways it’s just so much stuff. I have no idea how we’re going to get to it all.

When I finally took a breath, out of the blue he says to me, “Ok, we’ll sail to the moon. We’ll go to Walmart for their chocolate pies.”

At that point, I looked over at him and just busted up laughing.

“Sail to the moon? Are you sure?”

“Yes, sail to the moon.”

“And what was that about chocolate pies and Walmart?”

“Oh, we should go to Walmart for their chocolate pies.”

I looked over at him, and again, starting laughing. At that point, he was grinning at me and laughing as well.

So what in the hell do moons, Walmart and chocolate pies have to do with anything in the lab? Well, nothing if you think about it. We were having a momentary lapse of reality that resulted in obscurity given what we had just been working on at the time. The best part was that we were laughing and having a good time yet we were at work.

Now this particular coworker and I were not getting along so well just over a week ago. In fact, I had been begging for them to get him out of micro because he was getting on my nerves. Now, things have changed and I’ll be sad when they put him in the core lab.

Last week, I started to train him a bit and he’s been so compliant with everything I have been teaching him. I’ve been showing him cultures and hoping that he takes something away from it that he can use one day. He’s been working so hard on so many things that I can’t help but be a bit proud of him. He’s doing all of the set-ups and the maintenance on the Microscan. He’s been shadowing me when I’m working in the queue, asking me questions about cultures, and helping me with daily QC. He’s also redesigned nearly all of the forms we use to document the QC/QA. He’s really doing a bang up job and I know with a bit more training, he might master micro one day.

He recently told me that he wished I had been his professor in school. He also said that he thought I knew more about micro than his professor did.

I looked over at him and said, “Thanks! All I’m doing though is showing you what my trainers and professors showed and taught me many years ago.”

His reply was, “Well I appreciate it. No one here wanted to show me anything. I didn’t know what I was doing. I’m sorry I screwed stuff up.“

I told him not to sweat it because when we’re all learning something new, we screw up. It’s one of those constants in the universe. When it happens, you take note, learn from it and move on.

Now the general mood in micro has changed and it’s wonderful. I am going to miss him when they put him back into the core lab.
I guess for now though, we’re just going to keep ‘sailing to the moon’ and ‘going to Walmart for chocolate pies!’