Week 7: Technical Difficulties...

Hi guys! This week was a bit uneventful work-wise, but it was definitely much much better than last week.

 

On Monday I went into work, my mentor was out of town for the rest of the week so I made a game plan for what I was gonna do while he was gone. (Spoiler alert: my entire weeks plan fell apart). But anyways, I puttered around, took some measurements, worked with plotting them in Origin, you know, the usual. There was a scheduled power outage for Tuesday in the lab I work in, so at the end of the day I had to shut everything off properly.

 

Tuesday I teleworked, or at least tried to, but Origin decided to not let me use it! Something about the maximum amount of licenses being used, so it would close itself every three minutes. Super cool! (this is me being very sarcastic). Thanks to that I got pretty much no work done!!!! Anyways, later that night me and a couple other interns went to see the sunset on the water by the Kennedy Center. It was beautiful, albeit suuuuper buggy.

 

On Wednesday, I went into work, and turned everything in the lab back on. Everything turned on EXCEPT for the lab computer that I absolutely need to have working so I can take my measurements. I literally have no idea why it won’t turn back on, I even got one of the veteran employees to come help me and take a look at it, and even he had no idea what was wrong with it, so I had to put in an IT request to fix it. Then, I had to manually write down data points for like 20 different curves, which was incredibly tedious and took me a couple hours to do. After that I called it a day and went home. Later that night, a few interns and myself went to the Wharf! They played funk music and it was a great time.

 

Thursday I also teleworked, at least tried to. Origin was still not working, and with the computer also not working, I can’t take measurements nor cool down the cryocooler. So there’s little to be done. Later in the night the interns got together and had another potluck! The theme was “Hometown Glory”, so I decided to make this Finnish holiday cookie called Joulutorttu. For it being my second time making them, I think I did a pretty good job!

 

On Friday I went in to see if there had been any updates, but alas, I learned that the computer wouldn’t be looked at until Tuesday of next week, and Origin STILL wouldn’t work, so I also had to put in an IT request for that as well. It was a short day at NIST since I literally could not complete any of my work, and I won’t lie that was reeeeaaaally disappointing. After work I hung out with some of the interns and then called it a night!

 

I slept in on Saturday, then later went to H&M and got some super cute clothes! Later that night the interns had a get together and the theme was Barbenheimer (in reference to the Barbie Movie and Oppenheimer) and then I went back to my dorm room and chilled for the rest of the night.

 

Sunday was a pretty good day! I went to the Georgetown flea market and got to see some really cool vendors! Stuff was pretty expensive so I just bought a ring, but I will definitely be going again. I chilled for a bit after that, played some video games and then later in the afternoon I played my first Dungeons and Dragons game! It was SO fun, and we are meeting again later this week to finish the story. Props to MJ and Emily for setting it up, the story is SO elaborate and overall just amazing.

 

So that was my week! I’m really hoping that this week I can get some work done and the tech issues I’ve been having can get resolved.