First

It feels a little strange writing this journal entry, knowing that nobody will ever read this, but, well, if the professor says I have to do it, I guess I have to do it.

I'm not really sure what to write, so I guess I'll start by introducing myself and explaining why I'm writing this in the first place: My name is Edward. Today is my first day working as a lab assistant at the SlantShack Jerky Experimental Laboratories. I'll be working the graveyard shift here, running a couple of the ongoing jerky experiments, and generally cleaning up after the day shift. The day-shift staff consists mostly of graduate students of the professor, who come out to the lab to do research as part of their dissertation.

The reason I'm writing this now is because the professor specifically asked me to. It's kind of strange, really, but he says he wants me to keep a journal of what i do at the lab, and specifically focus on writing down how I feel each day, what I'm thinking, worries or hopes or concerns, etc. Yeah, weird, I know, but it's apparently part of a larger experiment the Professor himself has been a subject of for the past couple decades. One of his former colleagues is collecting a huge set of psychological data from various other doctors, scientists, lab technicians, and the like, people who spend a lot of time doing lab work. He then has some sort of algorithm that analyses the change in the writign style, like the frequency of adjectives, typos, mispunctuation, and relates it to the overall mood of the writign? I don't really understand it, myself, but it's fun to imagine some super-advanced computer program reading what I'm writing. (Hello, computer program! How are you today? How's the family?) I have no idea what his hypotheses are, but apparently the purpose of the experiment is to better understand the psychological effects caused by constantly performing experiments, or something? Yeah, pretty strange, but I gotta do it as part of my job description, so no point in complaining about it.

I guess that's sufficient for now. Until next time, my autonomous pen-pal!