Mid July

In the blink of an eye and it’s mid July. That means I had been working for 3 months. Ouch that’s fast. It feels fast too. At this rate I think I can stay in government forever and it will feel just like a couple of years. Not that it is a bad thing to consider. Easy job relatively good pay.

One of the pharmacists calculated for me that I was being paid like RM25 per hour. Not bad considered that I spent half the morning and whole afternoon playing Sudoku at work today. Not that I wanted to do that, but there’s nothing else to do. And everyone is playing Sudoku.

By the way, I am now at the analysis lab at Pending for the week, which is quite a distance away from the hospital (more than 10km). Basically what they do here is just to wait for someone to send some non-registered drug samples in. No samples equal to no work equals to Sudoku.

In the event that there’s some drugs to be analysed, like today, the pharmacy assistants will prepare the samples and then run some tests on it using some used-to-be high tech machines. Yeah its the GC-MS and HPLC machines that we oft deride in MedChem lectures as being useless stuffs that we will not encounter in our work.

How untrue it was! So here I am this week, trying to figure out what the heck does those initials stand for and how in heaven do there measure stuffs and how to read the graphs that the printer cough out. Luckily there’s no need for me to learn how to deal with them, I just need to know such things and such career path exists. Apparently the pharmacy assistants went for a 3-months long course just to learn how to utilise those machines.

So it will be like a honeymoon week this week. Next week I will be back to the hospital, working in the in-patient pharmacy. At least playing Sudoku is getting my brain working again, after spending the past month doing minimal brain utilising work.