Lacuna Moon

It’s been a hellacious couple of weeks.

Not quite a month ago, the local environmental laboratory certifying body were pleased to announce that the statute revision they had been requesting passed.  According to the statute, all environmental laboratories servicing the State will follow a new set of rules, mostly concerned with documentation.  It is a national standard that these rules are based on, and Minnesota is the 13th state to adopt NELAC standard.  The rules, in of themselves, do not ensure higher quality or scientifically defensible reported results — it could be argued that as long as you document how bad your laboratory is, you could still maintain your accredited status, provided that twice a year you minimally pass analytical performance tests (and come up with an acceptable answer), and still put out low-quality data.  As long as you have procedures and policies in place to address quality issues, you are not really required to correct those issues.  I’m exaggerating a little bit, but, I admit, but the scenario I just proposed is a possibility, provided that the lab in question plays by the rules.

The kicker was, on June 3rd, all certified labs received a letter telling them that they must be compliant with the new rules within about 3 weeks.  Effective today, the new rules can be enforced.  The main problem is that the rules went from about 30 printed pages to about 150 pages of rules that affect the labs.

As an environmental consultant, I have helped out several clients in terms of improving the quality control of their in-house laboratories.    One such client works for a larger parent company who has a 100% compliance policy.  Come hell or high water, this fairly small laboratory was going to fulfill the requirements by today.

The parent company hired my company to make it happen.  And I was one of the key organizers of the effort.  WHile I wasn’t “in charge” per se, I was a primary facilitator for many of the people working on the project.  Our company provided about 30 employees — those employees put in a total of nearly 700 hours to meet this commitment.

We made that goal today.  Exhausted, but successful.  There is easily much more work that can be done on the project to fine tune all of the required doccumentation requirements.

If it took 30+ people 700 hours to bring a relatively small lab into compliance, can you imagine what a “full-service” laboratory has to endure?  Maybe not too much more effort as the core documents were already a requirement for the laboratories (Standard Operating Procedures for analytical methods),  but the labs probably had plenty of sleepless nights if they made the deadline — which I doubt.

There was an implied grace period but, because it was only implied and not in writing.  We all know that, unless it is in writing, it doesn’t exist.

I’m exhausted and I didn’t even do most of the work.  I delagated and answered questions and organized to keep us from walking all over each other.

To be honest, this event had the potential to be one of the worst things that could happen to me or one of the best things.

Stress levels were high and stress is never very good when you are trying to break old habits that were an intregal part of you coping mechanism for stress…

I might have fallen flat on my face with my recent choice to embrace sobriety, but I didn’t.

Sure, there was more than once that a little voice inside me was telling me that one or two beers wouldn’t be such a bad idea — but I already know where that would lead…  So, I ignored that voice and plugged on.  It is somewhat liberating to have gone through a high stress period without relying on alcohol to sooth my nerves.

Of course, I’m keeping the Coca Cola Company in business with my consumption of diet Barq’s, Sprite, Coke and Nestea….  Still, that’s zero calories compared to my intake of 1000-2000 calories each night.  Not as bad as the other option.

But the biggest thing is that I am now 21+ days sober and not terribly inclined to go back.

Guess the stress was a good thing, because it proved that I could handle it without a beer at my side.