Monika at work

As was pointed out to me, my week in Lodz post did not include anything about my place of employment. Hence, I decided to devote a whole post to my work. I apologize in advance, since I do not consider this to be all that interesting, but some people are VERY curious about the conditions I work in.

I hope this little photo journey through my lab will suffice. Enjoy!

A look into my lab from the doorway. On the main floor in the back you can see the lab while the stairs lead to the "loft-like" accommodations upstairs where we have the office.

After walking through the door, on your left there is our storage and glassware area. Notice the emptiness... Also, all of our chemicals (except for the ones that might polymerize, those are stored in the fridge) are stored in these wooden cupboards. That's right, all the flammable, poisonous and sensitizing materials are kept here. This is in violation of soooo many Canadian health and safety practices it's not even funny.

A close up of one of the bottles. Not sure if you can read it, but the label clearly reads BENZENE (in Polish). You can see the flammable and poisonous labels right on the bottle. Notice also the spotless conditions in which we store everything (top right corner).

Ah yes, the non-electronic scale from the year 1978. Its operation is quite time consuming and it's very unreliable, but we cannot afford a new one so alas we made due with what we have.

This is our lab. You can see the 30 kg liquid nitrogen tank sitting on the ground. We pack this thing into the back seat of a FIAT which belongs to one of the PhD's in our lab, secure it in place with the other front seat and drive across town to get it filled. Then we put it back in the back seat (note that I'm in the back seat as well and FIATs are small) while this thing is evaporating away. Combined with Polish roads and Polish drivers, it always makes for quite an interesting experience.

This is my experimental set up. The little box thing is an oven which runs at 650C and the coil on the far right side is around 120 to 145C. Add into the mix a pump that gets quite hot and a non-air conditioned building and you get an idea of my work conditions. Luckily no one minds if I wear a tank top and shorts :)

A close up of the chamber where I coat samples and also the cold trap. You can see the liquid N2 bubbling away.

Having taken care of the downstairs, let's see the office area shall we.

This is the view from the stairs down into the lab. Exciting, isn't it?

This is what you see once you reach the top of the stairs. No one sits in this area right now, but it's all equiped with desks and Internet hookup. You can see our lab fish on the left. One of the postdocs left to Japan and donated them to the lab. Two have already died because of the heat; we came back once after the weekend and the water temperature was 36C...I guess they were not THAT tropical of fish.

When you turn around and walk the other way, you get to our sitting area. My desk is one with the giant computer screen on it.

And finally, a view of my desk, all the stuff that's on it, and the view that I get to admire while working there. Lucky for me, I don't have to work on the computer that much and if I want to use the Internet or do some more serious writing work, I go to the computer lab down the hall. As you can see the set up in not very ergonomically friendly (Katie you'd love this set up :) ) As some of you have noticed there is toilet paper on my desk. Reason? Well, here in Poland at the university there is no toilet paper in the bathrooms (very normal) so each must supply their own.

So there you have it. I hope that you all enjoyed the tour and that your curiosities have been satisfied.