Siliceous and Delicious

Roused myself from the weekend lie-in to appear for an 8 am FIB session, after my session booked for Tuesday had been cancelled and this the only replacement session available. Almost needless to say, in went the way of all of my attempts at productive research so far, as I summarized in my email to Nicholas, the FIB technician:

I was on the FIB yesterday morning and I ran into some problems. There was a new object (some kind of a probe or wire or sensor) sticking out in between the FIB and SEM columns that I’ve never seen before. I was unable to do the eucentric alignment because when I raised the stage up to get the working distance to 5mm, the stage contact alarm went off, even though I had plenty of clearance from the base of the SEM column (around 5mm, I’d say, because I was fairly close to being in focus with the WD set to 5mm). I can’t be certain because it’s a little tricky to judge depth from the CCD, but I think it was because this new object/wire/sensor was in the way and making contact with the stub.   I tried to get in touch with you via David Bell (his cell phone number was posted on the hallway walls in B15) but he didn’t have your number either, so in the end I just gave up. Anyway, I hope I didn’t damage anything, but in my defense I was following the procedure we went through in training closely, and I don’t remember that wire/sensor/detector thing ever being a part of it. I have another session booked Monday morning from 8:00, so I would appreciate it if you could advise what to do either by email in the meantime or in person then. If not, I’ll just cancel my reservation and reschedule for a later time.

Also needless to say, he didn’t get back to me, so I cancelled the session for Monday morning. Oh progress… when will I ever get to meet you, mysterious creature?