Wow, I just made my bi-hourly visit to the labs, and guess what! I've got access now.
All it took was 2 emails to the person "in charge" of granting access, 1 email to my manager, who apparently "overlooked T when I was going over the list the other day," and a week of sitting on my ass.
So, I finally got into the lab, ready to get to work on my project. The excitement caused adrenaline to surge through my body as I opened the door and strided proudly to my bench. Then I noticed nobody else was in the lab (which is the main reason "knocking" hasn't worked very often to get into the lab, as everybody keeps counseling me to do).
Not that I minded nobody else in the lab. I could get to work, alone, without being bothered by other bored engineers.
But wait. The test rack that was to have been shipped to my lab yesterday wasn't there. So, again, I had nothing to do. Oh, yes, I could have built up a new test rack all by myself. But, there was a perfectly good rack 10 miles away in a warehouse, or so I was told. So, the dilemma I faced was wasting another week of my life building a rack myself and hoping nobody showed up midway through with the working rack or trudging back up to my desk and posting this while browsing monster.com and Hotjobs.
You can see which choice I made.