The Sky is Falling

Greetings. Sorry for not blogging in a while, but there has been a minor lack of stupidity at the Mecca. I think that what is actually happening is that I have been burying my head in the sand and trying to get work done. I have been marginally successful.

Where to start? We shipped our first instrument for real money at the Mecca last week. We even managed to get a press release out of it. Apparently, the original draft of the press release very heavily stressed the fact that we had passed the safety approvals. The Biotech Mecca - our stuff is guaranteed not to electrocute, maim or otherwise incapacitate or kill our customers. It would have been an bonny press release. But alas, MNB had them tone down the lack of death and destruction aspect. Pity.

So... you've shipped an instrument. The only problem is that you're not sure that it works. You think that it works, but you don't have any good data out of it yet. You have some excellent, although pretty much irrelevant data for a sample that
was specifically designed to work except under the most hopeless of cases. So, you know that the thing more or less works. The problem is that every time you try to run the type of samples that customers might be willing to pay real money for, something goes wrong. People all of a sudden are rendered incapable of doing things like sticking a piece of tape onto the top of the sample.

Our outstanding biologists at the Mecca knew that they had about one week to figure out how to tune these instruments for real samples. They have had three or four instruments sitting around for the better part of a month, but have never managed to run more than the kindergarten samples. It started to dawn on people that our first customers would want to run more than the kindergarten stuff that has no scientific value, but that was only late last week. At that point, MNB issued the edict that the Sarcastic Brit or I had to observe the start of every run to make sure that the biologists were not doing anything funny, and try to ensure that things would work well enough to get sufficient real samples to tune the instrument. No meaningful data were generated last week. The runs were beautiful, but alas their boss hadn't mentioned that it was time to leave the sand table behind.

I don't think that I've mentioned the our service engineer and applications scientist (boy is that an exaggeration of his abilities) are boarding a plane for the Far East on Saturday morning. Too bad they still don't know what settings they need to put into the instrument get coax decent data out of it.

So, I was asked to ensure that we can get two decent runs out of the instruments before I go home tonight. The service engineer, who generally gets into work at about 7:30am to beat the traffic was still there at 6:45 pm. We were tweaking the instrument to get the best data possible out of it. The Chihuahua (small, nippy, nasty biologist) was attempting to dispense the samples. She was screwing it up, and looking for ways to make it not her fault. Her boss (Jaba) was hanging around, as well as one of the senior biologists. My cell phone rings. It's my wife. She asks me where I am. I reply that I am at work. She asks me why. I calmly tell her that I am still at work because the sky is falling. She says Oh. In that case, you are getting takeout for supper. I'll see you with the food.

Now... we have one more day to finalize the parameters for running our first customers samples. No pressure. Everybody is scared that it's going to go to hell at our first installation for a paying customer. MNB is hurling threats, promises, and anything else he can to convince the Sarcastic Brit and I to keep the train on the tracks. The Biologists have sat on instruments for weeks, not getting the information we need to be able to actually convince a paying customer that we have a clue, and now, we have to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

MNB has a fondness for acronyms. One of his favourites is PFA. That would be pulled from ass. That is where our parameters will come from. I just hope that whoever ends up pulling them is feeling lucky. Maybe I should tell our service engineer to smash all of the optics and plead shipping damage to buy some more time. Unfortunately the stellar biologists at the Mecca would most likely just use it for more crayon and finger paint time.