Day XII: Bausch & Lunch

We started the day with a trip over to B&L for a tour of their manufacturing lines and research labs. They provided a nice bus to get us there, and it ended up taking a longer time that I would have thought just to get into Rochester. It's like any sort of chartered transportation is guaranteed to take a longer-than necessary route, y'know? But I digress. The first step was to get all suited up like we were in the clean room from MicroE at RIT. I was hoping they'd let us keep the disposable safety glasses, they were actually really nice, but they made us give them back. Drat.

Anyways, we were given an overview of the contact lens, and we (the VP people) had a bit of an advantage because we'd heard a lot of this information in Boot Camp. We proceeded into the automated lines for contact production, which were really cool. It's not at all like the factory that shows the same process on How It's Made, but that's because the product was different. High-speed lines are generally for Daily lenses, this line was producing monthlies. Unfortunately, they were between runs, so most of the machinery was not active. Oh well.

After taking off the clean room gear, we went into their prototype analysis lab, or some similar thing. They showed us a bunch of different types of equipment that they use to look at the quality of the lenses they've produced and also to design new types of lenses to correct other ocular problems. It was pretty sweet, especially because I knew (again from boot camp) what the heck they were talking about. I felt a bit sorry for the other people there, I don't know how many of them knew the terms. Zonules, for example.

Once we were done there, we headed back to campus. Of course, no field trip would be complete without food, so the bus made a stop at a sub shop near Millennium. Amiel's, or something similar. It was pretty good, but I think I would have enjoyed Diabella's more. Oh well, a free lunch is a free lunch, and a good lunch it was. Thanks to Joe, for covering. I had a huge roast beef sub. (can't...believe...I ate it...all) But I regret nothing. It was a good sub.

When we returned to CIS, I returned to exile. I coded another two-three minutes of the Px #8, and that took about two and a half hours. Yep, I'm into the longer ones now...no big breaks in video to skip, so my pace has slowed down like a snail on barbiturates. So after a bit of time spent transferring files from one external hard drive to another, I began to transcribe a new tape. So someone will have to go and check this later, but for now my job is pretty simple. Tomorrow I hope to finish both the transcription of Px #21 and the coding of Px #8, then I can move on to the next set of tapes. The fun never stops.