First Day

Today was my first day at work. My schedule for the next two weeks is 10am-6:30pm. Although today we ('we' being me and the other girl they hired at the same time as me) didn't finish till 8:30 but we will get to leave early on Friday :). After that I will soon be changed to an early schedule so that come time for the sun to set early I will be off early on Fridays (7:30-4 I think...). Not sure on the specifics but they are willing to work with me from what I've gathered.

Anyway what did I do today? Well first we went over a huge hand book. Had a lot of info, some on safety, some on ELISA (the procedure they use to test for presence of antibodies against food allergens), HIPAA (confidentiality stuff), and general allergy information along with some scientific papers. After that we had a half hour lunch. Then we got to practice pipetting water into 384 well plates. I'm used to messing with 96 well plates it is quite a bit different (Volume of a well in a 96 well plate is 370 ul, in a 384 it is 100 ul so it is a lot smaller). We got to use a nifty pipette... one plunger but it has a row of 16 tips. Were told accuracy is more important than speed... still need more practice.

We got another break - ended up getting 45 minutes - went to talk to head person about tax papers and what not... but they weren't ready so we went to Starbucks and then came back (I really shouldn't have had coffee... I'm not really tired yet... that's bad I need to go to sleep so I can get up tomorrow and not fell groggy just think what will happen when I have to be ready to leave by 6:30 to get to work in time... yuck.). Talked to the head lady about the tax papers and the employee handbook then went back to work.

We then got to dilute patient serum in buffer to be used for tests tomorrow. I hope they all turn out good. I messed up a couple of times but caught it. Was told by the person training me that it was good that I caught it, but I still felt stupid for making stupid mistakes. But all in all guess it wasn't that bad... I am going back tomorrow so couldn't have done that bad. :).

So work environment is nice. People seem nice. Person who started with me seems nice. Although for some reason she reminds me of a girl I went to school with in GP - just because of her build, height, and hair length/style. This job definately seems like something I will enjoy.