This is the happiest I’ve felt in the lab for a long time, and I haven’t even done any science today. Yesterday, about an hour after I sent my final email, a gentleman from the IT support department came by the lab to pay me a visit, asking for me by name. After apologizing profusely for being so annoying (seems like I’ve been doing a lot of that lately), he said they’d be happy to provide us with some wireless internet, although it’d take a few days to get a new router up and running, making this one of the shortest wars in history.

Today, when I came back from lunch, I was delighted to find another gentleman installing said router in the control room adjacent to mine. Five minutes later, I was blessed with a four-bar, consistent, glorious wireless signal on my glorious computer; four hours later, it hasn’t waned even once.

Moreover, a relatively new labmate and I just spent the last hour rearranging the furniture in our ridiculously small room, in which three of us are based and which most of our fellow lab members frequent for much of the day. Insofar as research scientists are normal people, it’s a virtual party in our room most days. At any rate, the room is very oddly shaped, with a center island-bench and several work areas making up the periphery, but almost all of the space is taken up by equipment—microwave, centrifuges, scanner, plate reader, shaker, incubator, sonicator, -80, oh my! So, we rearranged. Everything that was here is still here, and yet we are left with at least eight extra feet of bench space. Perhaps the most convenient consequence of this stroke of genius is that I now have a crystal clean, four-foot desk/bench all to myself—and, of course, the wireless signal is amazing.

I will post photos eventually.