As my colleagues, and most of my students, know, I have flipped back and forth between being an experimental chemist and a computational/theoretical chemist. Because I am currently on the computation/theory side of my orbit, I was hoping that this Experimental Error article about the miseries of the lab would enhance the reputation of my line of work.
You can imagine, then, how sad I felt when I encountered, 7. Sometimes experiments fail for a reason. Sometimes experiments fail for no reason. This entry pointed out that “abrupt and inexplicable failure changes your work to meta-work” and compared an inexplicable failure in the lab to the vagaries of working with computer software. Unfortunately, I have to agree. Whether I am updating software and operating systems, rebooting hardware and resetting display resolution, or making the unhappy discovery that my filenames are using the wrong suffix or have been synchronized to the wrong folder, I spend hours every day doing meta-work.
