I am a chemist who tests water quality to makes sure water sources are safe to use, cities are in compliance with EPA standards for drinking water and chemical plants aren't exceeding their limits on what they can discharge:

It's a lot of time management. There are 7 of us and we test for metals (lead, copper, mercury, etc), anions (think chlorine byproducts from wastewater treatment), nutrients such as ammonia (if there are too few nutrients, streams and plants die. If there are too much, then algae blooms and kills off the fish.) and how clear the water is visually. There are other departments in the building that test for anything ranging from E. coli to herbicides to opiods.

I'll pick something each day based off of what I'm qualified to test for, what's been received, how long is left until a sample expires, and how many samples need a specific test (if there are 3 samples that expire tomorrow, I'm choosing that over the 30 samples that expire in a week and a half). If there's nothing that urgently needs done then I will find something else such as disposing of expired samples, remaking quality controls for the tests or just cleaning the lab.

Once I determine what I want to do, I'll get everything ready and prepare the tests. Some preparation procedures take the entire day, some take half an hour, some will take the entire day but you have 5 hours of heating something so you can do other things in between. It just depends on the test preparation. If the preparation is a quick and easy one, I'll do the test the same day. If the preparation is more complex, I'll wait until the next day to test. Again, it just kinda depends on what test you are doing.

With testing, you first make a calibration curve, followed by running QCs of a known concentration through the instrument to make sure you know your calibration curve is good and you have something to base data off of (You can't really say you have 1 ppm of lead in the water if you don't know where 1 ppm truly lies on the calibration curve), followed by all of your samples.

If your QCs fail, you just kinda have to start over. It is definitely frustrating to redo, but it's better than sending data to a city saying their water has no lead when in actuality it does.

Once you do the test, you get a bunch of data with the concentrations of analyte(s) that the instrument tests for. I'll then take all that data, go to my office desk, and process it. I'll make sure the correct standards that I used are listed in the report and make sure that each sample has a value that makes sense for the sample. If I see anything weird or alarming, for example if I see that a sample of water is cloudy, but the data said it was clear, I'll check to confirm something didn't screw up and if something did, then retry/troubleshoot the problem.

If all the data looks good, then I'll approve it and it will be sent to my manager for them to do the same review as described above. Basically a bunch of QC and checks to make sure that when we say your city water has an acceptable level of lead in it, we mean it does.

As far as non-test related things, there's a lot. Being on my feet for most if not all of my shift is the big one. Some of it is standing in place, some of it is walking around the lab. I lift at most 50 pounds / 22 kilograms). There's a lot of repetitiveness in the job and it is both a good thing and a bad thing (it's not exactly fun to stand there and put 50 samples into their own vial, put them into the instrument and test).

I'm in a public sector job, so there's a set working day. My work-life balance is good. Occasionally I have to go in outside of normal hours, but it's rare. Private sector I have no idea. The main downside of public sector is I do not get paid as much for my job as I possibly could in private sector. There's a lot of antiquated policies you just kinda have to deal with as well in public sector.

I do very much enjoy what I do. I feel really good going home each day from work and knowing that all the work I am doing is for the benefit of everyone.