Spring 2016 Week 9: Going paperless!

This week at TGen was a fairly busy and productive one. Let’s start at the beginning. Tuesday was important for a few reasons. The first reason was because I heard back from Sigma-Aldrich about them accidently not sending us an SDS with two of our purchases as well as requesting them to email us all of our SDS's from here on out. They wanted some information that was above my pay grade, so I had to pass on the information to Kathleen to take care of, but were a step closer to making TGen more sustainable and eco-friendly. Tuesday was also the board meeting for the heads of the departments. I went because I’m Kathleen’s intern I suppose, I really have no clue why I have to go to these things. During the meeting, the big thing we discussed was how TGen is going paperless. Over the next few months, all the offices at TGen have to scan all their documents and shred them, which leads into what I got to do today. 

Today I spent a few hours going through file after file after file, checking every single document in them to find its corresponding file on the computer so that we know what documents still need to be scanned before they are shredded. It was tedious work but kind of fun at the same time. It was the electronic document version of find Waldo. It also really gives you an idea of how bad some of these scientists in the labs are at filing their paperwork and writing up documents for research proposals. 

Anyways, next week Kathleen and I are finally going to print out some of the safety posters that I came up with and hang them. I hope they are a success and really get people there thinking about some of the silly mistakes they make.

Well once again, that is it for this week. Like always, I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you next week. 

Spring 2016 Post 8: The semester of the missing spring break!

Even though this week is spring break at school, it's just another week at TGen. Needless to say, I still had to go in for my internship. This is good news though because a fair bit happened that I am excited to share.

The first success of the week came when Kathleen told me on Tuesday that one of the labs asked her if they could have one of the chemicals in the waste room, that I cataloged for reuse. This is great news because it proves that the effort put into cataloging all the chemicals was actually beneficial. it also shows that the labs recognise that these chemicals are down there and that they can use them instead of having to pay ridiculous amounts of money to send them away to be disposed of.

The second big win on the week was that Kathleen and I were able to set up two SAA sites in the labs on the east side of floor five for beta testing. If these SAA's really catch on and are efficient that we plan to set up SAA's in the remaining sites that we scouted in the other labs.

Last but not least, I have to bring up the posters once again. I have come up with and found many good safety posters to the point where we are ready to print some out and hang them up for all of TGen to see. I'm not sure exactly when we are going to do this since we have a board meeting on Tuesday and Thursdays are short days, but it should be within the next week or so. I will keep yall updated.

Well, that's all I got. Here is a youtube video you should watch. It asks two questions for you to try and figure out if you'd like. It's some pretty interesting stuff. who knows, you may learn something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBjibuHxEk&feature=em-subs_digest

Like always, thank you for viewing and see you next week!

Spring 2016 Post 7: Posters

This wasn't a very interesting week at TGen so I don't have much to say. All I worked on this week were those safety posters that I mentioned in last weeks blog post. I've learned a lot of very interesting stuff while making these posters such as there are special explosion proof fridges specially designed to store your flammable chemicals in so that they don't blow up your lab, and that it is really hard to make whimsical education safety posters with less 20 words. I should consult twitter and see if they have anything that would be useful. Kathleen wants to get some of the posters that I came up with printed next week so that we can start hanging them up. We also want to get the SAA's set up next week now that we know where we want them. So pretty much, to summarize this week, I worked on posters and made plans to do a bunch of stuff next week. So next week I should have an abundance of cool information to share with yall. Until then here is an educational song about quarks. Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0kXkWXSXRA

Spring 2016 Post 6: More Lab Walk Troughs!

Hello, all and welcome back. As I'm sure you've already guessed were going to be talking about lab walk throughs some more. I know what you're thinking, "are lab walk throughs all this guy does?”. Well, sometimes it may seem that way, but no, I also do things, like make safety posters with pictures of dogs like this.

This picture belongs to a poster that says "If HE can wear his PPE than so can YOU!" HAHAHA! It’s funny because he's a dog.... Unfortunately, not all the posters will have dogs on them. I have a list of seven safety topics that I have to make posters for. So far it’s been fun trying to come up with witty and creative ways to convey the message through a single photo with as little text as possible. 

So now let’s get back to the lab walk through. So Tuesday Kathleen and I finally went up to the five west lab. It is a very..... full lab to say the least. It was nearly impossible to find a good potential SAA spot anywhere in that lab. Kathleen and I discussed renovating the lab and trying to find it some more space. The talk kind of scared me because the way she made it sound was as if she wanted me to do the renovations. I’m all for knocking down walls and tearing out cabinets and that sort of stuff, but I’m no contractor. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing like a good old DIY renovation project to get my blood pumping, but I’d rather avoid being sued by the city of Phoenix for violating building codes. Oh boy would that be interesting though. 

Oh! Good news before I go. I finally got all (or as many as I could find) the SDS's for the chemicals that I inventoried down in the waste room. Now it’s time to move to the next phase of that project.