NOT a nice quiet Friday afternoon

Friday afternoon. Hardly anyone is around.

SeniorStudent and I had just settled down to do a lovely Friday afternoon type job - going through a list she's compiled of possible field sites in the local area and ranking them according to various criteria, before making plans for a couple of driving around looking at them days.

However, it was not to be. Our cold store decided to break down. And the refrigeration company can't come out and look at it until Tuesday. And may well not have the part anyway.
We actually coped quite well - Helfy-Safety man persuaded another department to let us store essential samples in one of their cold rooms and rang round all the people who had stuff in the store (though most of them were missing, it being Friday afternoon before a three day weekend), SeniorStudent and I did some triage and identified all the samples we were sure would be spoiled over the weekend, and another of the technical staff helped us load them all onto a series of trolleys. Then we had a little procession of trolleys over to the other department, and piled all our stuff on the floor in the corner of their cold room. Hopefully next week the repair people will be efficient...

Both DrN and Golden Boy had samples that would be seriously affected by the problem. Both kindly gave me a list of those samples and said 'oh yeah thanks for sorting that out' when I went in to tell them about the problem, rather than actually, you know, helping. Sigh.