May. 26th, 2019

sciatrix: Several men from the musical 1776 looking into the camera, with COLLECTIVE NAY written below. (collectiveNAY)
-There is a power supply totally missing from one of my amplifiers. Those amplifiers each control two chambers and supply power to both of the connected microphones, so those "recordings" are from microphones with the power off completely and are, yes, useless. This explains two thirds of the missing data I was upset about last night.
-One of my colleagues, a labmate who does recording work but usually in another building, walked off with it and didn't tell me during a lull when I was not running experiments. (This was probably in a week-long lull when I was troubleshooting other things, shortly after I spent most of February getting the chambers in working order.) She left the amplifier itself in place, so without going over the setup end to end, it's pretty hard to notice exactly what is and isn't there.
-Actually, I've identified exactly when the lull was. It was in the end of March, shortly after I had verified that all my hardware was working properly and functional but while I was busily trying to nail down issues in my recording stimuli without wasting further animals. There has been no power going to my microphones in the bottom two chambers for all five runs of animals made within that time frame. This includes every single run that I thought had been executed correctly and for which I thought I had complete data.
-I do not feel I should have to be on top of the possibility of random components of my equipment going missing.
-I am not entirely sure WTF is up with the remaining chamber, but I suspect that my white amplifier was slowly going bad and/or slowly blowing a fuse again. I have replaced that white amplifier now.
-I have now spent my entire weekend carefully checking and cross-checking all of my experimental apparatuses. They work okay now.
-I am fully prepared to sell this labmate down the river if my boss complains to me about not having had the foresight to be checking this data as I was going. Actually, I will be selling the labmate down the river regardless, because he needs to know this data is missing and also: what the fuck.
-I do not particularly like this labmate and have similar issues in the past, which my boss has tried to both-sides during all conflicts because he fears open conflict. He has repeatedly asked me to minimize problems with her and be cordial to her. I will therefore be dumping this bullshit in his lap and accepting no criticism for this, because, again: WTF.
-Actually, because my boss repeatedly told me not to look at the enormous piles of recording data that came off this paradigm prior and to focus on publishing a manuscript he has now been ignoring my emails on for a week, I will be accepting no criticism period for failing to notice this earlier. Pushing me faster yields mistakes, and there's only so much I am actually capable of or willing to work.
-White amps are now going to be switched off unless recording is actually in session, and I need a checklist of all the things needing to be switched on and off as there are now... at least six devices that need to be on while recording and off otherwise.
-Fuck me, I really wanted to have more data than this before Evolution.

Probably coming later: a thinkings-out-loud about accepting responsibility and who really does and does not need to be nudged to do that.

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