Maintenance

So we all know that there are things that need to be taken care of from time to time with everything in life. Of course we never really want to do those little cleaning and maintenance things don't we. After all, there is usually something better (more entertaining/pressing) that we could be doing with that time. Well in today I learned a pretty good lesson on why I really should just take the time to deal with those things sooner rather than later.

The first example was related to my bike. Since I moved down here and have been commuting to work by bike I have noticed that my shifting is far from ideal. Namely I was having issues getting into and staying in the lower gears on my cassette. Stupidly I let myself live with the grinding noise and occasional phantom shift, but it really did suck. Of course I knew I could fix things easily if I just took some time to work on it, but I never feel or even think of working on the bike after a ride; typically this translates to the rest of my free time, why would I want to get so greasy and dirty. Well, thankfully a former teammate blogged about adjusting his derailer this weekend, inspiring me to get dirty and check mine out. And what do you know, after taking up a bit of slack in the cable I was able to shift perfectly. On the commute today I had perfect shifting, in all gears, and less than ten minutes of work was all it took.

The second example was a bit more subtle. In my research one of the instruments I use is also used by one of my undergrad students. While I was moving she continued to work and a few things didn't go quite as planned. Among them was an accidental contamination of the instrument. It took a couple of days to figure out what had happened and about a week to clean it out. Unfortunately that wasn't all that had gone wrong. Along the way the fiber optic coupling had gotten dirty, a bit of a sucrose solution had dried on it, leaving a transparent sugar crystal over the inlet. Well, this didn't cause any evident problems, but I had been having an oddly high incidence of unexplained light intensity errors (low light signal). Well, after getting about three of them this morning I actually took a close look at the fiber and noticed the crystal. Sure enough, just soaking the tip of the fiber in water for a minute cleaned it right up and decreased the background signal, which I had been trying to get down for about a week, by about 100 fold, to the point where there really is none.

So take this as a warning, if there is some little bit of maintenance you should have done last week, do it now, it'll be worth it in the long run.