Ace of Hearts - All We Are Series [NaNoWriMo 2014] [#JustWriteIt]

Chapter Twelve [Edited]

It was six in the evening on Friday night, and guess where I was?

My team and I were working down in the lab trying to figure out what substance was in it. A lot of the work was through calculations and chemical equations, as we tried to see what contaminant would react to create that substance without making the beaker explode or something.

It was tiring.

I had been working since lunch, and around five I decided to go back up to my desk and do some paperwork. I was neither a materials scientist engineer nor a chemist, so it wasn’t all that helpful for me to be working down in the lab. However, I had neglected all my other duties in the process, and it was catching up on me. I planned to make the team (and myself) go home around 6:30 pm though, as upper management would not be pleased if we had to give out that much overtime when we had the whole next week to work on it. Yes, they were a bit cheap, but to be fair, we didn’t really have that many other projects we were working on. It was more that finding the missing substance was a challenge to the engineers, and they didn’t want to stop working on their little puzzle.

Sighing, I rummaged through the papers on my desk, looking for the copy of the printed out test data. My supervisor, Antony, liked for documents to be submitted on paper instead of electronically. He also wanted every single piece of data, from test data to brainstorming ideas to cost analyses of each step of the process. Of course, this made things much harder than they needed to be because I had to get different departments to send me their raw data instead of just writing up the report based on the final findings. Half the time, Antony ended up sending back the findings with questions for clarification about the format of the data, why we used a specific unit to measure something, and so on and so forth. We had learned to increase the amount of budget we asked for by about 20%, because that’s how much would be removed, and include lots of pictures in the report. Antony mostly skimmed them, and just approved of what we wanted to do.

Props of being a better boss than my old boss, I suppose.

I finished compiling everything, editing and polishing the report. Glancing at the clock, I noticed that it was 6:25 pm – time to tell the guys to pack up and go home. I printed the report and stapled it to the raw data. Swinging by Antony’s office, which was just down the hall from mine, I dropped it through the mail slot on his door. I returned to my office and grabbed my winter coat, hat, and laptop. There wasn’t much work to do over the weekend, but I had gotten caught without my laptop before when I needed it, so I brought it home out of habit.

On my way out of the building, I swung by the natural oils research laboratory.

“Hey guys,” I said, knocking on the door.

“Hey Anaya,” they responded, peering over some beaker.

“Any luck?”

“No,” they all chorused gloomily.

“Well, I’m going to have to kick you out now. It’s 6:30; you should go get some food and enjoy the weekend.”

“Okay,” they sighed, obviously disappointed that they had to stop playing with the chemicals.

“You’ll have time to work on it on Monday,” I reassured them. “The other lines are coming along smoothly, and there’s not much work to be done right now. The other MatSci people are doing some other basic tests on the shampoos. It’s not like we can proceed with this for a while, anyways. We just released a new product, so the company will probably make us wait a few months before releasing another.”

“It never hurts to be prepared, though,” Charles pointed out.

“No,” I said cautiously, choosing my next words carefully. “You can’t spend all your time in the lab, though.”