Sinking Feeling

Happy Halloween, first off.

Once upon a time, I was in the basement of the ESC in the evening working on one of the microscopes. One of the million dollar microscopes, mind you. It was late enough that I was the only one there; everything was locked up, and I just had to shut the door behind me. Anyway, in the course of trying to use the microscope (I rarely succeeded in actually using the microscope, but I sure did try) I broke something. I did something wrong, I touched a wrong button, flipped a wrong switch, and I wasn't sure what I had done. The red light was on, things weren't working right and I had no idea what I had done. That leaves an interesting feeling in your stomach, knowing that you've broken something that's probably worth more than your life. I knew that the microscope was under warranty, and while it was worth 2 million bucks the worst case scenario would really be that the microscope was down for a few weeks, but anyway, it's a bad feeling. All I could do is leave an email for Jeff (the guy in charge of the machines) and let him deal with the problem the next morning. I never even got up the courage to ask what I had done, or what had gone wrong. Maybe I should have picked a career where there was less expensive stuff to break!