I'm probably forgetting some sort of stealth Jerk reference that happened back in January. Such is the life of a man without a country.
At any rate, yes, I am now a working man and there is a strong possibility that whitey still shouldn't be trusted. I hadn't really given a broad strokes update of my working situation, so here goes.
My average day runs from 6-2. We have tried to stagger it so that Charlie is only home alone for a max of something like eight hours. Emily takes Charlie out in the morning before she leaves for work - around seven or so. Lately he has decided that he doesn't want to wake up / get out of his crate. Too sleepy.
I wake up every morning at 5, wash up, and am out the door by 5:20. Some days this is more difficult than others. Today I was just dying to hit the snooze. No rest for the wicked. From there I head downstairs, grab the metro at Frederiksberg and take it to Vanløse where I switch to a regional train that takes me to Måløv. Say it with me.
I can take the C or the express version of the C, the H. If everything goes to plan, I arrive at Måløv station at 5:52 and can catch the 5:54 bus to Novo Nordisk. If I miss that bus, it's pointless to wait for the next one, so I just walk. It would be a good idea to have a bike just to travel from the station to work. I need to get on that.
The bus takes me right to the Novo complex. The main gate doesn't open for the bus until 6:00, so it sits there until the clock ticks over.
All of this timing is important b/c now - for the first time since I worked at Best Buy - I have to clock in and out. Every. Minute. Counts. I have a version of "flex time" whereby any hours worked over eight in a day get pooled up to a maximum of fifty. I just realized that I talked about this earlier.
Anyway, on to the actual "work". I work in an antibody lab. Without getting into too much propriatary detail, we are in charge of taking "material" from immunized animals, creating fusions from that material, screening those fusions for antibody producing cells, producing antibody from those cells, and later purifying and characterizing those antibodies for use in other departments at Novo. Some are for theraputic research and others are for in-house assays and what-not.
The name of the game is logistics. You need to know what's happening when and what you'll need both before you start a fusion and after the fusion takes place. It's complicated. There's a massive amount of manipulation and we have all sorts of high tech "robots" that do much of the heavy lifting. Changing media on at least fifty 96-well plates would not be fun to do by hand.
So it has been an adjustment. I've never worked in an industrial setting before and I've never really dealt with this kind of throughput. Baby steps. I'm also one of only a handful of non-native Danish speakers in the larger group of around 45. There's one guy from Germany and another girl from Switzerland, but they both speak Danish fluently. I figured that this would be a problem, and for the most part it isn't but it makes things difficult especially during breaks, meetings, etc. Everyone wants to speak Danish and I'm the reason that they would even consider speaking English to one another.
I stick out horribly and it makes me feel fairly uncomfortable.
There's a certain expectation - and I have been told this directly - that at some point in the not too distant future I will speak Danish passably well enough to not use English anymore at the office. Yikes. Maybe I won't get renewed in November and I won't have to think about it.
Yesterday we took a field trip out to the undisclosed animal facility. The whole tour was obviously in Danish - I had labmates translating much of the information for me. As with most of these situations there's a sort of cursory "well, we could do this in English" but it's not really honestly meant. It usually devolves into doing the presentation in Danish and then catching me up on the "important" details. It makes me feel like a five year old.
In positive news, the facility had Beagles! I got to pet them! Fun times.
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