Considering I usually just talk potential clients out of hiring me and tell them over the phone, or otherwise help without charging, I don’t see what I have to lose.
Hope it helps folks.
I think the data collection forms, or at least these forms as templates for data collection forms are the most valuable (and some folks I’m sure, will realize that they should be recrystallizing their isolate, at least once).
It took me the longest time, career-wise, to figure out what data I could and should collect and how to organize it into forms that could also help train/remind the techs/me what should be paid attention to while working.
Some unsolicited thoughts;
Production lab work is amazing, but also perilous. You do the same tasks repeatedly all day, for months or years on end and so you can build up an amazing amount of experience in very short periods of time. Like crazy crazy amounts. But what you learn and how much you really gain from this work, can easily amount to not much.
Let me explain…
By the simple fact of doing something so many times, often considerably more than other more research-based folks, the production lab environment can give you a huge amount of insight into the processes/tasks you are performing. This means it is possible in a relatively short period of workin you may suddenly be able to contribute something valuable to the subject matter. Somthing that researchers and other interested parties haven’t and may not ever have been able to contribute. This is extremely hard to do in modern times, especially for a scientific outsider or parascientist, (which is how i would describe myself and I think, most of us in cannabis/hemp), and is an accomplishment worth chasing and celebrating.
Frustratingly, that same situation that imparts such unique potential, (eg, doing the same tasks over and over all day), can actually be very hard to take advantage of. Once one has learned the task, the natural response to such mind numbing repetition is to start daydreaming and stop paying attention in a critical way.
When this happens you can expect to learn nothing at best and start substituting superstition and conjecture to explain unexpected outcomes, at worst (eg, why your isolate is sometimes less white and occasionally seems sticky, or why your distillate varies from batch to batch between a nice light yellow and red, or why you’re occasionally seeing raffinate spitting over into the distillate outflow on your wiped-film, or whatever it is).
This means that without continued effort on your part, the unique experience and insights that are available only through such high-throughput production lab work will never come to you and you’ll simply remain at the knowledge level of that SOP.
Lab Directors, managers, and supervisors take note;
Allow your new techs to sit at their machines/stations and stare for the first few months, at least. Meet with them regularly to discuss what they are learning. Its okay if it’s nothing in the beginning. Help them learn, indulge their thirst for knowledge and then get out of the way. They should eventually, hopefully know details about the process that you don’t, take advantage of that and be sure to acknowledge that contribution.
Have and show them some respect.
Technicians, processors, and other lab workers:
Don’t waste the opportunity to grow and really set yourself apart. You’re basically in school at work, if you treat it like that, you’ll grow significantly in a short amount of time (If you think you learned it all after a year, you’re not pushing yourself). Remember, just because you know more than the manager or director about the minutia of the process, doesn’t mean you deserve their job, don’t need their guidance, or have surpassed them. You’re doing different things. They should be guiding the big picture stuff, and if they did their job well, then they are expecting you to exceed their teaching of the individual process components.
Have and show them respect.
“Outside of a dog, a book is a mans best friend,
inside of a dog, its too dark to read”
~Groucho Marx
