.there, there, my little triple quad.
29 August 2008it’s a unique relationship a chemist must have with his instrumentation. instruments are the product of amazing feats of scientific genius, but coupled with temperaments that are finicky and sensitive. as the saying goes, if you treat them right, they’ll treat me right. i have a true blessing in that i have some pretty nifty (and very pricy!) and modern equipment that i tinker with on a regular basis. this week i’ve been working on my gc-triple quad ms and she hasn’t been very cooperative. i’ve been having a number of issues with her this week, ranging from too low pressure in the source, carrier gas restrictions in the column switching valve, absolutely flat baseline for my chromatograms, and the list goes on. i have the added stress of two clients that want results yesterday. it’s been a tough week trying to resolve the problems, and there were times when i would have loved to take a sledgehammer to it or better yet take it to the top of the press box at the football stadium and drop it and watch it shatter into a sexagintillion pieces (yes, that’s a real number). fortunately for the company, i do have some self-control, i don’t own a sledgehammer, and it would be too heavy to take to the swamp. i’ve tried everything, short of whispering sweet nothings into the injector, that seemed to be logical solutions to the problems at hand. and this morning, after some prayer and a few final finishing touches, i fixed it. it seemed like an eternity (ok, a true exaggeration here), but it finally worked and i was able to make good progress on my research. praise God! yay!
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