eau de Autoclave

It's funny how vividly smells trigger memories.  I used an autoclave to sterilize rooting mix yesterday and that distinctive autoclave odor sent me down memory lane.  It's difficult to describe, a slightly sweet but earthy smell.  With one sniff memories of my undergraduate job in a fruit fly lab came flooding back.  Liquifying fruit-fly medium, scrubbing out tiny vials, sterilizing and refilling the vials with fresh medium.  The things you do for an honest buck when you are a student.  But I must say that it got me thinking about jobs where you don't think, you just do.  You shut off your brain and work.  You don't even have to decide what you need to do or how to do it, you are just told.  Sometimes I miss the simplicity of those kind of tasks.