I'm a traveling Metrology guy. It sure is fun bringing home a $250k Leica laser tracker home to my house that is worth less than what's in that box.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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Is that the same company that makes histology stuff? half my lab is Leica equipment
Possibly, Leica seems to make all sorts of fancy (expensive) stuff
Microscopes, too!
I found the more I work with high dollar equipment in a lab the more relaxed I've become with it. Everything is so obscenely priced in R&D you just get desensitized
As someone who builds $50k lab equipment, we service insanely abused units all the time. While they're expensive, customer service is great.
When you work with high value goods long enough in any field you get desensitized to it. However you compartmentalize it in weird ways.
I think nothing of ordering $800K worth of stuff at work. Then I get home and refuse to pay $8 for a fancy coffee because it's ridiculous.
Well you're not a multimillion dollar business so that makes sense. 8 dollars for coffee IS ridiculous.
Unless the boss is paying for it
In my first year of grad school, I was visiting a colleague's lab and was asked if I wanted to test some of their new diffractive optics. I said sure and started toying with the big lens on the table, no gloves, no precautions other than trying not to drop/smudge it. After about 5 minutes of geeking out over the fact that a perfectly flat, transparent lens was focusing the light, I asked how much it would cost to get one sent to my lab for an experiment I was working on. He said that it was the only one of its kind in existence, but the manufacturing r&d cost for it was over $50K alone. My heart nearly fell outta my chest.
wait,,, $50k for a lens?
Yup, though the $50K was specifically the R&D cost to develop a technique for making the lens. It used a nano-scale pattern on glass to focus light via diffraction, as opposed to standard refractive lenses or mirrors. The ultimate goal was to develop a process for manufacturing these lenses en masse, for deployment in a large particle detector where traditional lenses wouldn't work. They succeeded, and nowadays (6 years later), they can basically print the pattern using the same techniques as in microchip manufacturing. Back then, though, there was just then one prototype that represented that $50K of research, so I am really glad I didn't fuck it up haha
woah :0
I work in scientific equipment. It helps to focus oneself to occasionally imagine the box as being full of $100k in $100 bills, when I debate whether to leave it in the car or take it inside overnight...
... I said to myself as I meticulously removed all traces of the serial number.
For the stuff that's worth >a million bucks, the serial number is like "6"
Also, typically notoriously hard to fence, cause nobody knows what the fuck they're going to do with a gamma ray spectrometer or whatever.
Ya and taking off the serial number doesn't really matter when it's less than 10 😅
Never again having trouble figuring out the exact welding wire needed for all the gathered materials in a project seems like an excellent perk by itself.
Over COVID I was given 3 of the widgets that my company manufactures to take home in case I needed to help diagnose a customer problem. Stuck them in my backpack and walked to my car, then realized that my backpack was now worth about $150,000. When I got home I emailed my boss to confirm that, if my house were to burn down, the widgets would be covered under the companies insurance policy
I'm self employed and use/rent out air sampling devices, and this is exactly why I have an insurance advisor nowadays.
When the stuff I have at home costs as much as the home, I think getting some professional advice is very worth it.
I actually got to use the Arecibo Observatory a few times. There are these things called tie downs that keep the big ball thing from falling over trying to look beyond its ability. At the time they were down for maintenance, so they told me to just not fuck it up. I was 22 at the time.
Better triple check those coordinates I just entered...
Its okay at the end of it all, someone else broke it.
"hey, do you guys use a comma for a decimal or a full stop?"
"It's kind of important to me"
It has a euro sign so I wouldn't be scared. It'll just be insured.
This happened to me at work. I was talking to the chief engineer, and he handed me one of the products he was working on.
Thinking it probably was worth $100,000 I asked how much it was worth. He said "Oh about a million dollars"
Then why'd you hand it to me?!
It's cool but holy moly!
I felt the same way after being handed a corp full admin account over the datacenter. Like "I wouldn't give my car keys to a toddler, but here I am..."
make sure you do that with everything, like even a beaker full of h202 so when they actually break the expensive stuff they don't sweat it