4 august 2026
training
forty-one minutes ago we got an email from the centers for disease control and prevention. this message is telling it to take a look at a training on "packing and shipping dangerous goods", which it assumes relates to biohazarous, flammable, or otherwise corrosive materials. definitely a good thing to know if this is your thing, but it feels a little dystopian to go into work that very much doesn't handle this, thumb through its five different inboxes, and then lay eyes upon the out-of-reach fruit of its non-labor. not a single part of anything about us detailed in our resume applies to its current job besides the experience gained from this job, and yet it keeps moving up and up and up and up in a field that It Does Not Want. it's on this one to break the evil professional cycle before it starts having to sit in on meetings with higher-ups about upcoming changes to enterprise operations. in fact, it was added to the mailing list for the weekly updates that only the full-timers and the team lead get yesterday. it is neither of those. it fears what this might entail, but perhaps it is a nothingburger thing.
like, it has quite a few "certifications" that don't really mean much of anything because it seems like the cdc wants to provide basic training to as many people as possible through their onelab reach program. it's a cool thing that exists where a lot, if not all (it's not too sure) of the trainings can be perused for free. it's nice that this is a service that is provided because, for example, up until the other day it didn't know much about laboratory risk management, and now it can ramble about it. practicing it on the other hand is another story: it stares at a screen about 18 hours per day and the last time it stepped foot into a laboratory was two months ago. if it were any more networked it would ask people if this program even means anything or if it is just wasting its time.
its blood also isn't clean, so even if it wanted to change gears into working in a lab it wouldn't yet be able to, nevermind the growing stress of the upcoming semester it still hasn't paid for in full. maybe it'll get into that organic chemistry class? really hoping that one person leaves the roster so we can get in via waitlist. we need this. we need to stay on track. we need to stop doing weed. sooner or later. but the dependence has taken root.