Lab rat (a poem)

[u/Airvian94]

Round and round the table I go
Pacing the room in circles like a vulture
Except my soul isn’t lying dead in the center of the room
It’s decaying inside me as the seconds go by that I’ll never get back
Is it possible to lose your mind in a week?
The view from the windows isn’t worth taking in but it taunts me with the fact that there’s an outside I can’t go to
Confined to a space just large enough to be deemed adequate but small enough to suffocate you
The only company I have are the soulless machines I’m becoming more like everyday
Their hum comforts me as it’s too similar to the constant ringing in my ears
People are meant to have purpose
My purpose here is to just be a warm body in a cold room
Is this how it feels to be a lab rat?
A literal lab rat

[u/Airvian94]

The context for the poem is I just switched to a new bench so I’m doing training and it’s the slowest and easiest bench ever and I hate it. The job itself is pretty great but this bench needs to go away, it’s like sitting for 6+ hours a day and maybe 2 hours of work at the most. I’m bored out of my mind.

[u/wistybear]

You guys have a window?

[u/Airvian94 → u/wistybear]

We’re in the corner of the building so my department actually has windows in 2 of our rooms. The view from that room is just another building right behind us and you can see the docks where all the delivery trucks come and go but that’s it.

[u/wistybear → u/Airvian94]

I apologize for the facetious comment.

I think clinical lab could be the best job yet it isn't.

I also never had a lab job where I was bored, save a rare holiday or weekend day that was slow. Every lab I worked in ran me ragged and a lot of that was due to always being short staffed ( because we could not keep people-because they were run ragged. )

Your poem definitely conveys the soulless times when you feel like an object rather than a scientist.

[u/Syntania]

My suggestion for the last line, "And what's beeping now? "

[u/Airvian94 → u/Syntania]

Interestingly none of our machines make an alert sound.

[u/Syntania → u/Airvian94]

Lucky!