Been thinking about work lately, and how I'll quite possibly miss it despite the boredom and periods of downtime that crop up more and more, now that I'm leaving. Take my co-worker K. for example. She sits right by me, so I talk to her every day. We rehash the same topics -- the weather, what we did over the weekend (she gardens), her health when it takes a turn for the worse, or Panama, her Senegal-parrot-slash-surrogate-child. K. is not a real go-getter in the sense that she doesn't "take the initiative" in learning new technologies, but she's dependable, and she'll take tough projects w/o complaint. I think the fact that she comes in at 6 am every day wins her points in my boss's book, too. Granted, she works an 8-hour day like everyone else and leaves by 2 pm, but she gets things done--no more, no less. The thing is, by the time everyone else gets to work, she's already finished her experiments, so it seems like she just sits in front of her computer all day. Sometimes it annoys me, because I'm the kind of person that needs a pacesetter--someone who will get me motivated--and her example just hasn't been doing it for me.

Anyway, our -20 C freezer seriously needed defrosting b/c it was beginning to resemble the ice planet Hoth from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I needed to get something from the back of the freezer this morning and it was frozen solid to the wall, so I decided to defrost it. This involves unplugging the freezer, opening the freezer door, and letting all the ice melt before plugging it back in. K. offered to help me. We separated reagents we wanted to keep from those we wanted to chuck. I guess I was "in charge" of the job, so while she pulled things out of the freezer, I transferred them down to an empty freezer in the basement. After we cleared out the freezer, K. went back to the lab to throw away her trash, and I started scraping the ice from the walls. I succeeded in getting rid of everything except for the big slabs of ice before I had to leave for lunch (my vanpool took me out today).

When I came back, K. told me she had finished scraping the ice out of the freezer, wiped it down, and basically gotten it ready to go back online. I was pleased and not a little surprised, because it seemed so uncharacteristic of her to charge ahead like that. I knew her to be a passive sort of person -- but what do I know, anyway? Maybe she needed me to go away for a little while in order to finish the job on her own. I'd always had my own spin on what I saw, but her passivity could've simply sprung out of an overwhelming desire to avoid the limelight. I mean, she really despises giving talks. And getting in so early in the morning may be her way of getting done what she needs to get done without having anyone watch her. I guess that can be paralyzing for some people. I know she's not a lazy person (which is more than I can say about myself). She genuinely wants to contribute when she sees a need. Whether it's fear of failure or not wanting to draw attention to herself--something like that--she just doesn't like to make the first move, at least under close scrutiny. And I should have been more open-minded about that.

I guess that's what I'm going to miss about my job. The last four years of working side-by-side w/ppl who are in some ways not so different from myself, in other ways very different, has really been an opportunity to learn more about myself & ppl in general. I'm looking forward to entering a field where I'll have even more chances to do that in the future, if I can get past the 1st 2 years of being wedded to my books. O_O