Your Daily Dose (Maintain Safe Distance From Screen)

Find a puppy*.

Place all your hopes and dreams on the puppy.

Now, vigorously shove puppy into the fan belt of a mid-70s Chrysler land behemoth.

Note how the burning smell brings tears to your eyes.

This is how I feel about withdrawing my application to LLNL today.  I was treated like crap before I even got a chance to be hired.  I will be a lower tier employee in their eyes forever.  All I had to do was jump through a hoop like I was still their technician employee and accept an at-will appointment for a maximum of six years.  All I had to do was give up a professional position with a pensioned career appointment in this economy.  The cost is a delta of $15k and not returning to the land of Secret Squirrel for the foreseeable future.

I do not feel that I made the wrong choice, but it makes IAEA and non-proliferation work seem very far away right now.  I'm not sure what the path to that goal looks like outside of a national lab.

I wish this was a Friday so I could get properly drunk about this.

*: I say "puppy" because "kitten" would be extra depressing.  I mean, I'm not at wrist slitting levels here.  I've seen a kitten foolish enough to keep warm by crawling up into an engine.

...are All Hands meetings.

There is nothing more fun than a one hour meeting that runs a half hour over where no useful information is conveyed despite actual insightful, searching questions from the audience.  I was shocked that some of my co-workers were capable of such thinking.  It was very much a meeting because management felt it necessary to Say Something, except that everything anyone wanted to know they couldn't say.

I have also gotten a stern finger waggling whilst sniggering by my manager for creating a new term that is spreading through the Laboratory like curium-244 contamination.  Story commences:

On Tuesday, I went to go visit a former co-worker that now works in the Department That Doesn't Get Out Much Because They're Too Busy Thinking Terrorist Thoughts.  She asked how things were going out in the Lab at large.  After due consideration I described it as, "Ohgodohgodwe'reallgonnadietheskyisfallingit'scoldoutsideilostmypantsandthere'sabearthatwantstoeatme!!!"

She blinked a few times and then she began laughing in way that I felt justified in grabbing the spill clean up kit, which only made her laugh more.

This morning I was shocked to hear someone else describe a situation as "No Pants-Bear" bad.

I win but it is taking a modicum of booze to take the edge of this all hands meeting that just finishedf.