‘If this works, I will send you the equipment back straight away. If it doesn’t, you’ll get the pieces.’
That’s what every scientist said as they scrawled their name onto the rental lease with their stolen biro, ‘Hope to have it back to you soon.’
Holding a notably fragile 1986 resonance spectrometer under their arm, the rabbit hearted scientist, Bernadette Willthorpe, jostled her grip slightly and ignored the tell-tale sound of valves breaking as she edged toward the doorway. It was snowing outside, slippery pavements, numb fingers; it wouldn’t take a doctorate in applied logic to understand that the spectrometer was going to need some work when it came back to the lab.
There was something about lab coats that annoyed Grainne.
You could buy them, anyone with the brain power to unlock a smartphone could find one if they wanted. That was the problem! You should have to earn a lab coat; just being allowed to don the white overcoat as you find fit cheapens the whole institution of science. The boffins wore white, the techies wore blue, logic was a peace in the world; Grainne couldn’t count the number of times she had hurriedly wiped baring grease onto her coat and felt safe in the only repercussion being her washing machine would need a new filter. That’s why she wore blue, that’s why she kept making Tim clean the oil cutter until he learns to stop using the wrong colour lab coat–damn whatever miracle of bleach that man uses to get the stains out.
‘You ok to calibrate that?’ Grainne asked, knowing full well that scientists saw incorrect calibration as part of the process.
‘Um, I just leave it on zero wind up the impedance?’ Bernadette said with trepidation, suddenly fearful of an ulterior use that the spectrometer was capable of. She had never leased anything from the store before and wasn’t ready for questions. ‘I’ll just read the booklet if I get stuck.’
Grainne sighed with every molecule of her slouched shoulders and tired eyes, the lab assistant was trying her best to leave but was now politely stuck between holding a heavy piece of lab equipment and not having a spare enough hands to be able to open the door. Seeing the panic of a trapped gazelle behind Bernadette’s fumbling, Grainne loped over to the door and held it open for the young scientist
‘Firstly, you’re holding it upside down, not a problem but keep a dustpan close. Secondly, the instruction booklet is written in German, you should be able to work it out with the diagrams and a good imperial to metric conversion chart. Don’t ask why they used imperial; it’ll only mean two more textbooks that you’ll have to read.’
There was enough time to run a quick tally of how many valves had presumably fallen from their mountings and she was already etching their replacement onto the rental lease as Bernadette tried to garner a better grip and breaking more valves in the process.
Grainne was a good maintenance clerk, patient and logical enough to know that she was probably too patient. People admired her willingness to help but there is a finite number of times that you could fix something before the operator should have been yelled at. Everything can be repaired, yes, but when Thesis’s multimeter has had twenty-one out of the original twenty parts replaced you can’t guarantee its accuracy.
Trust in your equipment, Grainne thought while she watched the lab assistant struggle. I hope they still teach that to the first years. If I were a teacher I’d add, “results may vary” for good measure, but there’s no room for levity in science anymore.
‘Oh, no, and um, yeah.’ Bernadette extrapolated, finally managing to jostle the spectrometer the right way up and attempting to hold it with a more confident air, ‘would you have anything that’s more referenceably pragmatic?’
Knowledge, failure, data, law; A scientist’s process was as set in stone as the first rock that someone managed to bolt to the front of a wheelbarrow. Grainne wasn’t too troubled by broken equipment, she was always chuffed when someone took up the initiative to learn, but the old mechanic was tired of method making way to assumptions and what could be extrapolated from the remaining pieces; you can’t always go to the hammer when there’s still perfectly good screwdrivers.
‘You’ll be right Burn,’ Grainne laughed, stamping the lease receipt, and dropping into the outgoing tray with an all too practiced ease. ‘Drop whatever you can find back on Monday, I’ll decontaminate the rest; you’re using lab twelve?’
J. McCray
2022
Sunday Short Stories 