On the front door of UNIT, listed with about twenty other rules, was number ten: the Doctor is not allowed, under any circumstances, to tamper with the technology in any labs or hospital rooms.
He took it as a suggestion, because sometimes it became necessary to sonic things, not that he'd let any of the other employees see as he rewrote the rule in his head to read "the Doctor is allowed, when needed, to tamper with the technology in whatever room needs it."
-.-.-.-.-.-.-
It was his first day at UNIT, and Rose had convinced him to wear his best suit, not that he planned to change out of it again for a while; it was an exact copy of the one he had had as a Time Lord, and he had already formed a close attachment to it, much to Rose's amusement.
He hurried to the room he'd been told to report to; as he spent more time here, he'd be moving around from lab work to hospital work throughout the day, but they wanted to make sure that he was as qualified as he and Rose had made him out to be in previous interviews and interactions. Looking down at his wrist, which now required a watch, he sighed slightly. Well, timing had never been his strong point.
But it didn't seem to matter as he entered the empty room, a machine's quiet beeping the only sound that reached his ears. He frowned slightly, walking to the back wall and pulling out his newly crafted sonic. The machine in question was scanning some sample or another, trying to pull out the information that UNIT could use in their various experiments. Glancing back towards the door to make sure he was alone, he turned a few knobs on the device in his hand, pointing it at the machine, and pausing any calculations it was making. It was a habit of his, he supposed, made worse by the metacrisis, that he would always tamper with electronics when he was alone and nervous. Not that he'd ever admit that a first day—one of his first steps towards domestics—was making him nervous.
He sonicked the machine for a few more seconds, making it save its progress, before pulling out the sample and setting it lightly on a counter near him, walking around to the back and pulling off a panel to reveal the wires beneath. He frowned in concentration, knowing he could get this to work much more efficiently, if he could just get to that wire in the back and connect it to the wire way down at the bottom.
For a few seconds, the wires seemed to do what he required. But then they sparked. He pulled his hands back quickly, staring at the wires for a few seconds before putting his hands back into the machine. Within seconds it was sparking once more, and he was jumping back, sonicking the panel securely into place once more and putting the sample back onto the machine. They would be coming soon anyways; it was probably best that he stop tampering with the machinery of a company he hadn't spent one day with, anyway. Turning the machine on, he took a step closer to the door, just in time for a few workers in lab coats to come bursting into the room, eyes widening. "What did you do?" one asked, running to the wall and grabbing the fire extinguisher.
He turned around, realizing far too late that maybe the technology here didn't always work the same way as the stuff in his universe. Or maybe he simply wasn't as technologically savvy in a human's body. Either way, he winced, realizing that he had failed to notice the smoke rising to the ceiling.
It would take him and Rose a lot of convincing to keep him in this job.