Labs

My labs are not ready. They were supposed to be ready on Friday. I was so, so very happy. My student were very happy - perhaps happier than me. (I should probably stop using happy now). But, no, they failed inspection.

A team of people inspected the labs to determine their state of readiness, and we all determined they were not ready. There is a laundry list of things which made this so, so I will not bore you. But they both (there are two labs) failed. It wouldn't be so bad if only one failed. But they both failed.

There are two reasons this is a problem: 1) my students are currently borrowing desks in many different professor's office throughout the building (they are three different offices on three different floors) and 2) I have three rather large pieces of equipment arriving on either Friday or Monday. Large = heavy, in this case.

Currently, all of the "stuff" that has arrived for my lab is sitting in my office. This is not to say I have some massive office - it is more to say that my office is becoming increasingly crowded by boxes, and if I wasn't unpacking things as they arrived to eliminate the excess space that the packing material takes up, I wouldn't fit in my office by this point. The large equipment won't fit - it wouldn't fit even it my office was empty. It wouldn't even fit through the door.

So, one of the labs needs to be done before the equipment gets here. Ideally, they both would be done, but at this point, I'd settle for one. However, unfortunately, the reason for "failure" wasn't stuff like painting or electrical or flooring (which would mean the crew could focus all of their efforts on one lab and get it done). It was that "stuff" which was ordered hasn't arrived yet, so they couldn't install it (electrical outlets, cylinder racks, safety cabinets, etc). This reason effects both labs.

In any case, I went from being extremely happy friday morning to being very disappointed. And what really contributed to everything - I met with the contractor on Wednesday, and he explicitly said everything would be done by Friday (I asked that specific question). He had to have known on Wednesday that he was running behind. It really makes me mad.