Stepping outside my usual role
Aug. 12th, 2015 08:59 pmI spent the entire day washing buckets and my fingernails are not happy (the gloves are not tight around the wrist, so water seep in from the hose spray).
Small bones and charred seeds etc are usually recovered via soil samples, and it's the environmental department that deals with processing these and washing the buckets to send them out to the next site. Normally there's no problem with keeping up with demand, but when all sites (or what felt like all) call for 20 or 40 buckets each for the end of the week we suddenly found ourselves with 180 buckets to wash. Unfortunately that coincided with a large move of samples between offices: 2000 buckets from us to Cambridge, and that was a full-time job for all environmentalists*. Since I didn't have any urgent deadlines, I was asked to wash as many buckets as I could.
I washed 120, and at the end of the day my colleague came and asked if I wanted the bad or the good news first. One site put in an order for 160 buckets... On the plus side, the deadline is not until Monday and I don't have to wash all of them.
*: As a bone specialist I'm sort of between finds (handcollected bones) and enviro (sieved bones), although in the office administration I fall under enviro. So, technically part of the environmental department, although in reality a bit to the side from the soil processing part of it.
Small bones and charred seeds etc are usually recovered via soil samples, and it's the environmental department that deals with processing these and washing the buckets to send them out to the next site. Normally there's no problem with keeping up with demand, but when all sites (or what felt like all) call for 20 or 40 buckets each for the end of the week we suddenly found ourselves with 180 buckets to wash. Unfortunately that coincided with a large move of samples between offices: 2000 buckets from us to Cambridge, and that was a full-time job for all environmentalists*. Since I didn't have any urgent deadlines, I was asked to wash as many buckets as I could.
I washed 120, and at the end of the day my colleague came and asked if I wanted the bad or the good news first. One site put in an order for 160 buckets... On the plus side, the deadline is not until Monday and I don't have to wash all of them.
*: As a bone specialist I'm sort of between finds (handcollected bones) and enviro (sieved bones), although in the office administration I fall under enviro. So, technically part of the environmental department, although in reality a bit to the side from the soil processing part of it.