I don’t know if this counts as a confession, not really. It’s more… something I can’t stop thinking about. It’s about work, I guess. I’m a lab tech – not, like, a scientist, just a tech. I help set up experiments, do the grunt work, make sure everything’s sterile. The usual. It’s fine. It pays the bills, which is more than I can say for my actual art, but that’s a whole other thing. Anyway. Part of my job, or what *was* part of my job, was double-checking other people’s work. Like, if someone prepped a batch of slides, I’d grab a random 10% and just make sure they hadn’t messed up the staining, or labeled them wrong, or whatever. It was tedious. Like, *really* tedious. And I always just… did it. Even though it felt like a waste of time sometimes. Then about three weeks ago, Sarah, who’s usually pretty chill, snapped at me. I was getting ready to do my checks on a batch of samples she’d prepped for a critical run – a new cancer drug trial, very high stakes, lots of grant money riding on it – and I think maybe I was moving a little slow. It was a Tuesday, I remember, around 4:15 PM, and I was just so exhausted from staying up until 3 AM the night before trying to finish that charcoal piece for the gallery submission. I hadn’t even eaten lunch. She just kind of threw her hands up and said, “Can you just *trust* me for once? I’ve been doing this for five years, it’s fine, just get it to Dr. Henderson before he leaves.” And I just… stopped. I told myself it was just that once. She was stressed, I was stressed. It would be fine. But it wasn’t just once. It started with Sarah’s stuff, then Mark’s, then even some of the newer grads. It saves me about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, every day. That’s an hour I can use to actually eat something, or sketch a bit during my break, or just stare blankly at the wall and decompress before I go home and try to force myself to be creative again. The time adds up. And nobody has said anything. Nobody has noticed, or if they have, they don’t care. The lab seems to be running just fine. I feel like such a hypocrite, because I always hated when other people cut corners, or assumed things were okay. I used to think, what if that one time is the time it goes wrong? What if someone gets hurt? And now I’m the one doing it. And I don’t know why. I mean, I *do* know why – I’m tired, I want my life back, I’m sick of feeling like a robot. But then there’s this other feeling, this… dread. Like a really cold, heavy stone in my stomach. Every single day I clock out, I think about those unchecked samples. I think about Dr. Henderson looking at data that might be wrong, because I didn’t spend those extra twenty minutes making sure everything was perfect. Is that weird? Does everyone feel this? I keep thinking about how easy it would be for one tiny mistake, one misplaced label, one contaminated sample, to completely derail a whole trial. And it would be *my* fault. Even if no one ever knew. That’s what gets me, I think. That I would know. It makes me so ANGRY at myself. I can’t stop thinking about it. Not really.