magicaddict | I Am Officially...

...done with this shit.

I am no longer employed by the Nationwide Building Society. This is a truly wonderful feeling. In the words of Sir Stephen Redgrave, if you see me go near one of those again, you have my permission to shoot me.

That is, of course, unless I'm buying one of their products - unfortunately, they remain one of the very best purveyors of financial services in the UK (at least they are when they work). My home insurance is still with them; the credit card's still free to use abroad; the current account, even though it's about to get a shedload worse, will still be cheaper to use than your average bank's version; the savings rates knock nine barrels out of the competition and the mortgages are the most transparently sparkling examples in the country.

It's just such a bloody rat-race to get people to buy them, and no-one cares about anything but the number of times you get a customer to say yes. It cheapens the hell out of what you're selling.
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Anyway, that's all over. On Monday, I start with these people.

Oxford Cryosystems have, for the past twenty years or so, been making cryostats to sit on top of x-ray diffractometers. Their products blow inert gas (either nitrogen or helium) over the sample at very low temperatures (down to about minus 245 degrees) to keep it cold, dry and air free.

Shining x-rays at a crystalline sample less than a milimetre in all dimensions in order to see how they diffract, and subsequently doing Complicated Mathematics with the resulting patterns to work out what the molecules look like (with accuracy down to thousandths of an Angstrom in distance and hundredths of a degree in angles between bonds) is a fairly exact science. Obviously if the sample is cold, it will be vibrating less, and the chances of getting a sharp, and easier to calculate, diffraction pattern go up. That's where we come in.

We produce a selection of these freeze rays depending on whether you want to use nitrogen or helium, whether you're doing it to a single crystal or a mass of powdered ones and whether your gas is coming from a dewar of liquid or a ring-main supply. The one I was hired mainly to deal with is this baby.

The Cobra uses a mechanical cooling system (a Gifford-McMahon refridgerator, for those who are interested and technically minded) to chill down nitrogen pumped in from an in-house ring main down to just above the point it liquifies, before pouring it in a constant stream ove the sample. It has a lot of moving parts, and they need regular servicing.

All over the world.

It's a poor month for a service engineer when they don't go abroad at least once on the company's ticket to install, demonstrate or service on of the products. They've had to hire another engineer in because they're shifting about twenty of the Cobras alone a year, and so the number that need to be serviced is steadily rising.

They want me to write technical documentation, become an expert on the machines, and, oh yes, start representing the company pretty much immediately. They're flying me out to Darmstadt the day after Renewal to catch the back end of the European Crystallographic Meeting.

All things considered, I think I could get to like these people.