Sometimes, things don’t match

I can’t tell you how many times people have asked me why I gave Bitter Guy that particular pseudonym. Well, actually I can tell you. None. But I figure that’s only because people are smart enough to guess that it’s because he was bitter. And boy was he bitter. Bitter Guy’s curve was completely off the charts:

Bitter Guy's Chart

When I left the lab, his bitterness had yet to decrease. But why was he so bitter? Well, I think it’s because Bitter Guy and The. P.I. didn’t so much… get along. Rumor has it that while Bitter Guy was deep in the throes of finalizing his thesis from home, The P.I. made him come in and clean out his desk to make room for new students. Apparently this horrified everyone but Bitter Guy, who took it in stride. Maybe his apathy is finally kicking in.

This was not the first time Bitter Guy’s desk was a point of contention between him and The P.I. In my last entry, I foreshadowed a confrontation between Bitter Guy and The P.I. regarding: The Too-Brown Desk.

During one of our many lab desk reshuffling, Bitter Guy ended up with more of a desk-slot than an actual desk. The problem was that all of the available desks had drawers on the right side, but because of a door next to his desk-slot, Bitter Guy needed a desk with drawers on the left side. The P.I. told Bitter Guy to try taking apart a right-handed desk and switch it around, so Bitter Guy gritted his teeth and prepared to do so.

Then, in a stroke of luck, Bitter Guy found a left-handed desk! It was the right size! It was perfect! But The P.I. saw it and said no. Why? Too ugly. The brown didn’t “go” with the rest of the lab furniture.

Too ugly? It didn’t match? Was The P.I. insane? As you are now aware, our lab furniture was mainly culled from the trash. None of it matched. Granted, none of it was brown, but to say that the desk was too ugly was absurd. But when Bitter Guy told me that The P.I. was refusing to let him have the brown desk on the basis of aesthetics, I was dumbfounded. "Has he seen the lab?" I asked.

Nevertheless, the desk was deemed unworthy of our lab space, and Bitter Guy was forced to take apart and rebuild a desk. Which did not go well. Eventually, Bitter Guy ended up with a gray table and a set of rolling drawers which did not match the rest of the furniture, but was acceptable.

A few days later, The P.I. moved the ugly brown desk into the microscope room.