making do

If the whole crew is on site and raring to go, and then you realize you've forgotten something critical, you try to make do with what you have.

In this particular case, the drillers had forgotten the core boxes for the hundreds of feet of rock core we were producing. No problem! Just put the cores back together, roll them into the black plastic we used to construct the decontamination pad, and duct-tape the packages together.

These went into the wayward core boxes a couple of days later.

Just make sure that the duct-tape labels are firmly stuck so that the "up direction", depth, and boring ID are known, so you don't end up having to piece together 50 cores by fitting the ends together.