Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Trying to blow those guilt clouds away

Any experimentalist will know what does it mean to work on a shared instrumental facility. It means you cannot even die if you have a measuring or beam time and if you do that luxury than you need to wait for one whole month (in most cases even more) for your next measurement time, that means you samples can die by then and you might need to prepare them again, that means no data production for next many days which is not a good feeling in the life of a budding research scientists. It happened with me last week as my daughter got very ill due to viral infection, I needed to let go my measuring week. Luckily my colleague swapped on my place last week and provided me this week for the measurement. But the problem now is that my daughter's school and holiday club is closed for three days in this week. As I am a single parent at this moment so I need to face the problem all alone. One month ago I had planned for three days leave on this week but now I cannot follow that. I need to bring full use to the measurement time. So one day I stayed at home, one day I requested one of her friends mother to take care for her and for the third day I phoned 5 other mothers but all of them have some other commitments, I called a child minder but she said she has no seat. Then I called one another friend of mine who is also a full time researcher but luckily for this one day she has some free time. After getting assurance from her, my next challenge was to explain my daughter about the situation. She has accepted the fact but she murmured slowly "Why my mum needs to work all the time and why my dad cannot stay with us?" Normally I am a guilt ridden person for all the decisions I take about my career and about my family and now this situation triggered those guilt clouds again. Only assurance at this moment is that these situation does not arise everyday and that at least on a day of such a situational crisis I have more than seven phone numbers to cry for help!

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