Med Tech.

When I was still gainfully employed I could explain (briefly) what I did for a living.  Clinical labs, OK, that's where all those tubes of blood, or samples of urine go to be tested for this or that.  I worked in the blood bank, testing bags of blood to get a "match" for a patient who needed a fill-up.  People have seen that, bags of blood hanging on a long pole, on TV if not in real life.  I worked weekends and holidays, and my 40 hour job too, so sometimes I worked 14 days in a row.  After 5 years I gave up the blood bank job, I was so exhausted, although the extra money was nice.

But my regular job was working as a research tech.  I worked jobs in physiology, biochemistry or pathology, for a wide variety of principal investigators.  The problem was that for most of these jobs I got paid from a grant, mostly NIH money, and most grants are for 3 or 4 years.  Once they run out, the investigator would write a new grant for another 3 or 4 years.  The results in fund-ability depended on a lot of things; cancer was the main project for many years, and now the top priority is Alzheimer research.  But if the grant ended and there was no money from a new grant, then POOF! I looked for another job.  Every 3 years.  It got really tiresome, never knowing if that new car was manageable when my salary was zero, and so forth.  And there was probably a bunch of other techs looking too.  As I got older, it got harder; I was a whole generation older than the investigator, who felt more comfortable being the boss of a young person and not someone the age of their parents.  And I had to take classes to keep up to date as science evolved into new techniques.  The last 3 years were heavenly, I was the lab safety specialist, paid on HARD money (not a grant) and I enjoyed telling investigators how to shape up, preferably before the OSHA inspections.  But once the mortgage was paid, and N was doing all kinds of consultant work at home for nice money on top of his annuity, I knew this was the time to get out.  Plus, they were building hundreds of new labs, and the thought of having to do so many inspections made me tired to think of it.  My replacement was a tech laid off too, and she was a great one for doing that kind of work.  So we overlapped a couple of months, and then I retired with 35 years of work.  My retirement wasn't much, but I had a nice nest egg laid back.

And I still haven't said what I was doing all those years, have I?  Think mice and rats, and sometimes rabbits and goats (YEW) that were studied for results that would occur mainly in people.  Consider radioactive compounds, and infectious techniques.  I worked one whole year on trypanosomes, the organism that causes sleeping sickness.  Fortunately we don't have tsetse flies in our part of the world, will that change as global warming increases?  Dunno.  Not my problem now.

And so went many years' work, many techniques, SOB bosses (we won't go there; karma will do it)  papers and grants, and some really nice co-workers, many passed away now.  I miss them, but not the  lab.

That is all for now, I'm sure everyone is bored by now, and time for me to go to therapy.  Bye!