Technicianing made pretty
Sep. 14th, 2023 09:32 pmFor a while now the Science Museum has been running an exhibit on Technicians, and I finally got round to seeing it today. I think it's aimed at school-kids with the aim of getting them interested in jobs in science other than being researchers. But to me, and I suspect to a lot of other people who have worked as technicians, the overwhelming impression of every exhibit was that it depicted a clean, tidy world where every bit of equipment needed was close at hand, clean, and exactly what was needed to get the world done, with clear uncluttered laboratories and workrooms with ample space for the work that's needed. In other words, a prettied-up world which only superficially resembled reality.
When I was a working educational lab technician I generally described my job as "the bludgeoning edge of science"; mostly repetitive, never state of the art, just something that had to be done to keep the cogs of science turning so that (hopefully) we would eventually churn out a scientist or two, or at least get the kids through their exams. Usually it involved a lot of trays piled high with not even slightly state of the art kit, bottles of chemicals with dodgy labelling and even dodgier contents, and endless washing up. By the time I retired the school had four technicians trying to cope with 240 hours of science a week in ten labs on two sites, nearly a thousand kids with very little interest in tidiness and lab safety, and a bunch of teachers who tried to keep things under control but could rarely keep an eye on everything going on in a crowded lab. Once I was gone they soon reduced it to three technicians, with so far as I know no reduction in the workload. Over the 42 years I did the job we had one technician and at least two teachers suffer nervous breakdowns and other psychological problems. And this was a school which on the whole had reasonably well-behaved kids...
My anecdotal knowledge of other technician-type jobs is that most of them seem to be similar - unless you're working in something really high-tech and big-budget, which is rarely the case, technicians spend a lot of their time just trying to keep things under control, and often doing repetitive parts of a process that passes through a lot of hands - the CSI / NCIS idea of a technician involved in every stage of an investigation comes to mind, because it simply doesn't happen - often DNA tests, mass spectroscopy etc. get farmed out to big commercial labs where there's someone who spends his whole life doing the same test over and over again.
Looking at the museum exhibits, I found myself really wishing that I'd had the good luck to find myself in one of those nice tidy labs. But the reality is that I probably would have got pretty bored - the up-side of the sort of chaos I worked with was that it was endlessly challenging and kept me on my toes. The down-side is that by the time I retired I had high blood pressure and other signs of stress, and breathed a huge sigh of relief that I was able to get out of it at 60 rather than hanging on for another five or ten years.
No moral here, except that I can't help thinking that anyone who decides to go into a career as a technician as a result of seeing this exhibit may be in for some disappointments. On the whole I'm really glad that it isn't my problem!
When I was a working educational lab technician I generally described my job as "the bludgeoning edge of science"; mostly repetitive, never state of the art, just something that had to be done to keep the cogs of science turning so that (hopefully) we would eventually churn out a scientist or two, or at least get the kids through their exams. Usually it involved a lot of trays piled high with not even slightly state of the art kit, bottles of chemicals with dodgy labelling and even dodgier contents, and endless washing up. By the time I retired the school had four technicians trying to cope with 240 hours of science a week in ten labs on two sites, nearly a thousand kids with very little interest in tidiness and lab safety, and a bunch of teachers who tried to keep things under control but could rarely keep an eye on everything going on in a crowded lab. Once I was gone they soon reduced it to three technicians, with so far as I know no reduction in the workload. Over the 42 years I did the job we had one technician and at least two teachers suffer nervous breakdowns and other psychological problems. And this was a school which on the whole had reasonably well-behaved kids...
My anecdotal knowledge of other technician-type jobs is that most of them seem to be similar - unless you're working in something really high-tech and big-budget, which is rarely the case, technicians spend a lot of their time just trying to keep things under control, and often doing repetitive parts of a process that passes through a lot of hands - the CSI / NCIS idea of a technician involved in every stage of an investigation comes to mind, because it simply doesn't happen - often DNA tests, mass spectroscopy etc. get farmed out to big commercial labs where there's someone who spends his whole life doing the same test over and over again.
Looking at the museum exhibits, I found myself really wishing that I'd had the good luck to find myself in one of those nice tidy labs. But the reality is that I probably would have got pretty bored - the up-side of the sort of chaos I worked with was that it was endlessly challenging and kept me on my toes. The down-side is that by the time I retired I had high blood pressure and other signs of stress, and breathed a huge sigh of relief that I was able to get out of it at 60 rather than hanging on for another five or ten years.
No moral here, except that I can't help thinking that anyone who decides to go into a career as a technician as a result of seeing this exhibit may be in for some disappointments. On the whole I'm really glad that it isn't my problem!