By finding alternative plates, if they go at their slowest pace ever, they'll save $86,400 in one year. That was just ONE way I saved them a fortune. You're welcome. This is not a joke: I consider being 4x more productive than anyone else to be my baseline. That's my starting out point. The Lab Director didn't need long to see what I could do. After less than 8 weeks he was prepared to offer me a 4-day work week and a 20% raise if I'd stay, and I could essentially call my own shots. Amazon has been ruined by fake reviews and cheap crap from China. I video review that cheap crap that I get at a discount so people know the truth before they get scammed. play.typeracer.com gives you an excerpt to type, and you do so in a race against several other typists. I'm averaging 100 wpm overall; max was 120. 98.4% percentile of typists. Woohoo! Although can't say I can maintain that in real-life...
I just now, on April 4, 2017, noticed that there was a ranking on my transcript. 22nd out of 293. Top 7.5%, not bad. Just wondering who the %*@#$* beat me?! NO WAY! Probably a bunch of people who studied finance or one of those 'practical' majors that is 'useful' in the real world. Whatever. I had to spent over $6k of my own money on lab supplies; no one else would. If you think 5 years in one lab is more valuable than 1 year at five different labs, then you just don't know. Every lab does the same thing differently. But if you've only worked in one or two labs, that's all you know, so you keep doing it that way whether it's optimal or not. I've seen it all. I've worked for so many different managers. Most labs have horrible communication between management and the techs because the PhDs are in charge, they know their way, they like their way, and you're going to do it their way. But if you want feedback on what's working and what's not, you don't ask the general, you ask the soldiers in the trenches. Not only did no one have any prior experience, they'd been trained in this abysmal culture and had no idea how a lab was supposed to operate. Labelling? What's that? Organizing samples in boxes and in racks? Whaaaa??
I was so far and away the most valuable employee (which wasn't saying much, but still) that I honestly thought they were going to give it to someone else. I've been trained to do PCR at 5 different labs. Each labs trains you <i>their</i> way. Not the right way, not the best way: their way. Well, thanks, but I'm going to take the best ideas from all 5 labs and do it the best way that I know how. And when a better way comes along, I'm going to adopt that way. There is no MY way, there's only the best way I know of at this moment in time. I told them I would probably run all of their samples and be looking for something to do. They all laughed at me. 'Haha can you imagine someone asking for MORE work hahaha yeah, right!' I have no idea why, but I'm obsessed with computer hardware. I get a dozen emails every day about deals on components that I don't need, and I look at every single one of them. I can't believe I've only built 6, that seems like so few... Two for myself, three for the last lab, one for the girl at work's home PC. Well, if you need a super-powerful machine that costs a fraction of what it'd cost retail, let me know! Seriously, we're talking $1200 for a machine that'd be like $4000 if a store even sold it (that's $9,800 in Mac dollars).
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