Flummoxed, positively flummoxed!

Well, things were a bit slower today at work. I had another busy day and night yesterday, with a trip back out to ARO after dinner to do an initial calibration for an all-sky camera that looks at proton light emission in the auroras. Anyhow, I was torn about whether to keep working tonight to catch up with some paperwork that I'm falling behind on, but ultimately decided for my sanity to go ahead an take a couple hours to watch a movie. Anyhow, while the flick is showing I get a radio call that we had a brownout, which meant that I grabbed the other two science guys in the room and we scrambled to go verify that all our projects were still running. I checked my gear in the B2 science lab across the hall from the lounge then headed out to ARO to check on my stuff there. My only project running was nominal, so I called the other science tech and offered to check his projects for him, as he was headed off into the Dark Sector to look at some of his gear there. So, checks complete, I got to go back to the station and send out a bunch of emails telling my projects that their baby was fine and didn't appear to have suffered from a briefly restricted flow of electrons to feed its insatiable appetite. I naturally used slightly less colorful and marginally more professional terminology, but you get the point. Thus concludes a glimpse into the swashbuckling life of a science tech at the South Pole.

Anyhow, my time card for the week, adjusted for tonight's little party comes to a total of: 109.5 hours. Raytheon contracts you to work 54 hours per week, and bases your inflexible salary on that number. A few weeks ago I already had enough overtime built up since the beginning of the summer that if I got comp time I wouldn't have had to work until the end of June/early July.

To quote B. Baggins, "I need a holiday, Gandalf."