Lavender Stocking

As we all know, good tools are big tools. Even big-brain stuff like electron microscopes are large enough that they need a forklift and a buddy with an intact lower back to move. Getting all that shit out of the filthy warehouse or partially-collapsed office building is a task on its own. Sometimes you need to buy new tools just to move it: good thing you're at an auction that sells stuff like cranes, forklifts, and low-mileage/high-hour pickup trucks with an inexplicable thick layer of coal dust on every surface. Make sure to check the return policy.

So you got it home, and now everything's easy, right? Not so. You see, when a big business buys a new piece of industrial equipment, it usually comes with some assistance. Technicians, or at least a single-page badly-photocopied manual telling you where to plug it in. As such, your first project quickly becomes: how in the seven divine hells of AliExpress do I get this thing to work?

Resurrecting this ancient beast of commerce is not quite as simple as a consumer product. Consumer products are, by definition, popular. Really good tools? They may have made like ten of them. There, one quick web search can rapidly locate thousands of arguing morons who have strong opinions on how to set it up. No: if the company that made it even still exists, the best you can hope for is an email from the current engineers asking you to take a bunch of pictures of it because they've forgotten how to make one run. Then you have to bribe an electrician to do something that is "not advised for houses" to your house, just so you can power it.

The scientific versions of this make me feel very glad that I’m no longer a lab rat, as the life-defining version of this for me was when I was a young lab rat tasked with tracking down an extremely defrosted armadillo from Texas.

When the consignment of armadillo parts - decorously placed upon dry ice, in accordance with the finest scientific principles - was shipped to a young British scientist and summarily lost in transit, it was one of those academic problems. You know what I mean by that. That means: Problems that only happen to academics.

The late armadillo was too late. Despite earnest emails promising that it had arrived a few days before, this was meant in a sort of spiritual sense, and what you might refer to as the “material” aspect of the dead armadillo manifested many days later. This was the subject of some fraught discussions between the ivory tower and the US Navy, who said rather stiffly that they had shipped a dead armadillo in perfectly sensible dead condition to us, and had no idea why the American postal service had interpreted their instructions as “send the dead armadillo on a quirky little road trip and lie about it.”

Intense discussions about the dead armadillo revealed the US Navy had no sense of humour about Schrödinger’s Armadillo (“we sent you a dead armadillo, and have washed our hands of any downstream issues”) as well as their rather uptight announcement that they would not be sending us any more free dead armadillos unless we could prove that WE were not in the habit of carelessly losing them. The implication being that this important military armadillo corpse had been lost entirely because the postal service had received it in a spirit of unbecoming whimsy, and this was the fault of Elodie, lab rat and designated representative of the United States Postal Service. As the military arm of the imperial core are naturally the primary suppliers of high-quality scientifically reliable dead armadillos, this censorious and frankly ungenerous cooling-off was a topic of some consternation.

Elodie, a very young person at the time, who rather fancied the British postdoc who looked so enthralling in riding breeches, was thus tasked with tremulously arguing with the Navy about how grateful we were for everything, but how fresh armadillos were far more academically interesting, while we were on the topic, if they didn’t mind, and if they could spare another one, if we promised not to allow the mail to become whimsical.!

The academically interesting part of the metaphysical armadillo was eventually run to ground significantly after the point at which the dry ice had become academic. The state of the armadillo inside the box at that point was an extremely academic problem. The late armadillo had become so late that it had surpassed biological interest, yet had not quite entered the realm of palaeontological significance. It was, however, a stage of lateness that was officially Too Late. It smelled of an unusual kind of death, simultaneously pork and mouse.

As the most junior of junior lab rats, it fell on me at the time to sneak the box into the medical waste in someone else’s laboratory (as is only honourable.)