Grad Lab Adventures: Where are they now?

A couple of weekends ago, we had a blast from the past at the Grad Lab Household. Grouchy Guy came to brunch! He has completed his post doc in Switzerland and is now a professor at my undergrad alma mater. Incidentally, it is also his undergrad alma mater. By crazy coincidence, Grouchy Guy and I actually went to the same college and grad school, and ended up in the same lab in grad school. It's funny, because I don't think we exchanged more than three sentences in undergrad. Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure those sentences were, "Hey, Grouchy Guy! I heard you are going to Ivy League Grad School." "Yeah." "So am I!" Grouchy Guy was kind of reserved in undergrad. I didn't even know he was grouchy. (For the record, he also sported a hilarious moustache while an undergrad. I have our class picture, and this moustache* caused The Doktah great merriment indeed.)

But that is not the point. The point is that I got to hang out with Grouchy Guy for the first time in about three years. Living abroad must have been good for him, because Grouchy Guy is not particularly grouchy anymore. We had a very nice time at brunch. The Husband made omelettes to order, and I made a cheesecake and sangria. Also in attendance was Grouchy Guy's German girlfriend, whom I had never met, and my friend from high school, Loud & Cheerful. At one point, I had to excuse myself to feed Jack, and through the closed door I overheard the following conversation:

L&C (speaking to German Girlfriend): So are you planning to move to the States?
German Girlfriend: [inaudible]
L&C: Oh? What kind of visa issues?
Grouchy Guy: [inaudible]
L&C: What? Oh, I didn't realize! Well that's great!

There is a reason I nicknamed her "Loud & Cheerful."

At any rate, I didn't really give the conversation much further thought until I was walking L&C to the front door. "Why did you tell me German Girlfriend is Grouchy Guy's girlfriend?" she asked me.

"Huh? What do you mean?" I replied.

"They're married!" she told me.

"What? Grouchy Guy is married? But he told me she was his girlfriend!" I exclaimed.

"Oh! No, they got married. I guess it must have been recently." said L&C.

When I returned to the dining room, I confronted Grouchy Guy with this news. "Why didn't you tell me you were married?" I asked him.

"Oh, right," he replied. "Uh, we got married on Monday."

I offered my congratulations of course, but that Grouchy Guy sure is inscrutable. Because if I got married suddenly, I would probably lead off with that news. Maybe in response to, "How've you been?"

So, congratulations Grouchy Guy Who Is No Longer Grouchy and German Girlfriend Who Is No Longer A Girlfriend. I guess we know why the grouchiness has faded away!

*Confidential to Grouchy Guy: It is only hilarious in retrospect. It was perfectly normal at the time.

Lying liars who lie

I am a very gullible person. As a result, people enjoy teasing me. The plumber, for example, tried to convince me the new toilet was pink and that we wouldn’t be able to use the bathroom vanity for 48 hours after it was installed. And back in grad school, one of Grouchy Guy’s simplest pleasures was to try to see what he could get me to believe. It was never malicious, but it was constant.

One morning, we arrived at the lab to find list of lab members with funny nicknames taped to the door. The author of said list was anonymous, but I knew it was Grouchy Guy and his buddy, Athletic Post-Doc. It had to be, because I had been out with the two of them the night before, and we had discussed just such a list. Some of the nicknames were even ones I had suggested.

When The Doktah got to her desk, she asked if I knew who made the sign, so I told her. “That’s what I thought,” she said, “but I just asked Grouchy Guy and he denies it.”

I looked at her with pity, and said, “The Doktah, Grouchy Guy lies. He lies all the time.” She was surprised, but seemed to accept this.

Now, as I think back on this conversation, I can see where I got myself in trouble. People don’t like to be called liars, and I should perhaps have chosen a different word, because a few hours later, The Doktah came and told me that Grouchy Guy was mad at me for calling him a liar. “But he does lie!” I said. “He lies to me all the time!”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, but he’s insulted,” she replied. “And he still denies making the sign.”

When I saw him that afternoon, I said, “Grouchy Guy, The Doktah said you were mad at me.”

“Yeah, where do you get off telling people I lie?” he replied. “I’m highly offended.”

“But you lie to me all the time,” I protested.

He was indignant. “Name one time I’ve lied to you!” he demanded.

“Well, this morning, after I knocked over that beaker, you told me I ruined your experiment,” I said. “And yesterday, you told me seminar was canceled. The day before that, you said I was supposed to be presenting at group meeting that afternoon.“

Grouchy Guy’s expression turned sheepish. “Oh, yeah. It’s just that I can’t help it! I can’t resist seeing the expression on your face! You always look so worried.”

We sorted everything out. I explained that, although I knew he was only teasing and it’s not as though he let me skip seminar or anything, he was, in fact, telling untruths. These are also known as lies. He stopped being mad.

And admitted to making the sign with Athletic Post-Doc.

Speedos

We had a French post doc in our lab for awhile, and, as it turned out, he had a red belt in Tae Kwon Do. So when he found out I was going to TKD classes via the school’s TKD club, he decided to tag along. Naturally, he had left his TKD uniform in France. He wrote home and asked someone to mail it to him, but in the meantime, he had to wear street workout clothes. This was very unfortunate. Not so much for him, but for the rest of us in the class, because his street workout clothes consisted of teeny tiny shorts and an oversized t-shirt. The overall effect was an outfit that appeared, at first glance, to be just an oversized t-shirt. This was very disturbing, particularly if he did a high front kick. It was bad enough that our TKD instructor started asking him when exactly his uniform would be arriving from France.

Around the same time, Athletic Post Doc taught Grouchy Guy and me how to play squash. To reciprocate, I offered to teach them how to swim. (Don’t I sound so athletic and in shape? It’s all a sham. At least, it is now anyway.) We had already had a few lessons when French Post Doc discovered what we were doing and asked how much I was charging for the swimming lessons.

Visions of his chicken legs topped with a European bathing suit swam into my head, and I told him, “It’s free unless you wear a Speedo. Then it’s $50 an hour.”

Maybe “Nazi” wasn’t the best nickname to give myself…

Of all the people in the lab, I used the most glassware. As a result, I was the most inconvenienced when other people didn’t wash their glassware. This caused me problems both because of the lack of clean glassware and because it was difficult for me to wash my own glassware when the sink was crammed full of dirty beakers and flasks. At first, I used to just wash all the glassware, even the ones that weren’t mine. But eventually, I began to resent this. “Why should I have to be the one to wash other people’s dishes?” I grumbled to myself, bitterly.

I decided to try to get people to clean up after themselves by leaving a message on the whiteboard next to the sink. I figured I would make it cute and funny in the hopes of amusing people while appealing to their sense of decency. So I paraphrased The Princess Bride and wrote, “To whom it may concern: Those of you who leave their dirty dishes in the sink will be challenged to a duel to the pain. Signed, The Dish Nazi.” I think I was subconsciously copying my mother’s old system of leaving notes around the house for me and my siblings that said things like, “Those who do not put their laundry in the hamper will be forced to wash their own clothes. – The Management.”

Yeah, it didn’t work for my mother either. Although my message did manage to amuse a few people, it did not so much succeed in inspiring my labmates to wash their dishes.

My frustration with the dirty dish problem unabated, I tried a new tack. I asked people individually to please wash their dishes when they were done with their experiments, as I was unable to use the sink thanks to the pile up. This actually worked for a few days on everyone but Smelly Lunch Guy who left his 15 test tubes in the sink for about a week after my plea. In a fit of anger, I confronted him, and he said, defensively, “Someone will wash them!”

“Yeah, ME!” I said. “I do them! What, do you think we have magical dish fairies^* who come around and wash all our glassware? It’s me!”

I became more and more fixated on the dirty dishes. Looking back, I think this period must have coincided with a peak on my bitterness curve. And you know what I found out? I found out that no matter how bad cute and funny notes may be at inspiring people to do their dishes, becoming a nagging, shrieking harpy is even worse.

Epilogue:
Eventually, I had to resort to apathy and when simply moved the dirty dishes out of my way, used the sink, and put the dirty dishes right back in. I stopped with the nagging, and people were my friends again.

^*Not to be confused with the microscope gremlins who misaligned the lamps every night. They were real.

I'll take stupid answers for $200, Alex.

Quizzo was a popular bar game in the city of my grad school, and for about a year, a group of us attending the Thursday night game on a regular basis. The rules of Quizzo were simple: Teams of people answered trivia questions read over a loudspeaker. There were four rounds of questions, and the team with the most right answers at the end won a $25 gift certificate. But you didn't want to win Quizzo to get the gift certificate, you wanted to win Quizzo for the glory. Our team didn’t usually win, but we held our own and had a lot of fun.

But sometimes, instead of holding our own, we were really stupid. On one such night, our team consisted of me, Housemate, Scottish Guy, Bitter Guy, and The Doktah, and one of the questions was, “What state has the most coastline?”

Scottish Guy, Bitter Guy, The Doktah and I started discussing likely answers. California, Texas, and Florida were all contenders. Scottish Guy said it must be Alaska, because of all of the islands of it’s coast. But then Housemate said, “No, it’s Rhode Island.”

Needless to say, we were very skeptical. Rhode Island? The state so small that you barely notice it’s there? Was he kidding? “No, I’m serious!” insisted Housemate. “I remember reading about it on a road trip through New England! Rhode Island actually has a lot of coastline!”

Well, he seemed pretty confident. And it also seemed like such an unbelievably stupid guess that he must know it to be true. Why would you ever guess that Rhode Island has the longest coastline unless you were privy to some secret information? And it wouldn’t be the first trick question in a round of Quizzo. So, following this logic, we wrote Rhode Island down on our answer sheet and told Housemate that he owed us all a round if Rhode Island was not the answer.

He still owes us that round.

Endnotes

Around my third year, I saw The P.I.’s First Grad Student working on his thesis. He was on the third or fourth draft of it, and I noticed that he was inserting the endnotes by hand. That is to say, he would type the endnote number, say “1,” click the icon to make it a superscript, go to the bibliography, and type in the reference. The problem with doing it this way, is that if you have 200 references and decide to add a one between references 2 and 3, you have to find every time you cited references 3-200 and change the numbers by hand. This is not trivial. And when you are writing a paper, you insert (or delete or move) citations all the time.

“Did you know that Word will do that for you?” I asked him. And then I showed him Word’s “insert footnote/endnote” function, which keeps track of the citations for you.

First Grad Student sat there at the computer, mouth agape, as I showed him this. Remember, he was working on his thesis, so at this point he was in his 5th or 6th year of grad school. “How many papers have you written doing it the hard way?” I asked him.

In a hollow voice, he answered, “Four papers, a proposal, and a fellowship application.”

Sesame Street let me down

I was out having lunch with Grouchy Guy, Athletic Post-Doc, and a visiting Post-Doc from Mexico. Athletic Post-Doc was also Mexican, and Grouchy Guy spoke Spanish at home growing up, so I was at a bit of a communicational disadvantage. Athletic Post-Doc and Grouchy Guy did their best to keep both me and the visiting Mexican involved in the conversation.

Wanting to show off what little Spanish I new, I said, “I don’t speak Spanish, but I did learn a few words on Sesame Street. I can say 'hola', 'como estas', and 'agua', and I can count to ten.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Athletic Post-Doc, encouragingly. “Let’s hear it!”

“OK,” I replied, and began. “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, huevo, diez.” But for some reason, when I got to nine, the three native Spanish speakers started laughing at me. “Why are you laughing?” I said, hurt. I thought that they were merely amused by my poor accent.

“Well,” said Grouchy Guy, “it’s just that you didn’t say ‘nine.’ You said, ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, egg, ten.’ The word for ‘nine’ is not ‘huevo,’ it’s ‘nueve.’”

So that explains the strange looks I get when I order neuve rancheros.

Do you use it to floss vinyl shrimp?

The Doktah and I have a policy that when you mishear someone, you should always explain to the general public what you thought you heard. Song lyrics are ripe for this sort of thing. I am usually the one who has no idea what the real lyrics are, and The Doktah once caught me singing along to Savage Garden’s “Cherry Cola:”

Ooo-wah, ooo-wah, one fine day!
Ooo-wah one fine daaaay!

Those aren’t the words.

But The Doktah has made a few errors in her day. For years, she thought ‘Til Tuesday’s song “Voices Carry” went like this:

Hush! Hush!
Even downtown
Voices carry!

But mistakes like these can happen in regular conversation as well. When The P.I.’s first grad student asked me to edit is manuscript, I suggested that he add the phrase “shed some light on.” First Grad Student and Smelly Lunch Guy – for both English was a second language – conferred about my suggestion, and then asked me if I was sure that “shit lightning” would be an appropriate expression for a scientific journal article.

My favorite mishear, however was the time The Doktah asked me if I knew where she could find the vinyl shrimp floss. She didn’t really want vinyl shrimp floss. She wanted an Erlenmeyer flask. Which is different.

So, this is some weather we’re having, huh?

During my first semester at grad school, the ten or so students in my class formed a pretty tight-knit group, a natural result of everyone’s taking the same classes and working on homework together. So when, in my second semester, one of the guys suddenly began turning down all invitations for get-togethers outside of class, it struck the rest of us as odd.

After about three weeks of his mysterious disappearing act, the rest of us started discussing his strange behavior. “Hey, have any of you seen him lately? I mean outside of classes?” I asked the group before class started one day.

“We were going to go to the movies last week, but he backed out,” someone replied.

“Yeah… a bunch were going to go to Quizzo at the bar, and he backed out on us, too!” someone added. Even The Doktah, who was actually pretty good friends with this guy during the first semester, hadn’t seen him in a while. Since this guy had grown up in the area, we figured he must have been hanging out with friends from high school.

So when he arrived at class I teased him by saying, “Hey, Crazy Secretive Guy, we know you have secret friends!” He looked very startled and said, “What?” nervously.

“Well,” I replied, “you haven’t been hanging out with any of us the past couple of weeks, so you must be hanging out with other people.” He just looked very shifty and changed the subject.

Well. As it turned out, he did have a secret friend. He had met a girl over Christmas break, and had been secretly dating her for weeks. He didn’t tell any of us about it until they got engaged about a month later. Why did he keep her a secret? We never did find out. We know that she didn’t keep their relationship a secret. In fact, one of our classmates happened to be friends with Crazy Secretive Guy’s fiancée, and had known that they were dating all along. She didn’t mention it to any of us grad students because it was obvious that Crazy Secretive Guy didn’t want us to know, but she had no idea why not. We could only conclude that we embarrassed him.

Crazy Secretive Guy got even crazier and more secretive from this point on. He had loaned me a sleeping bag for a weekend camping trip, and when I tried to return it to his apartment building, he wouldn’t let me upstairs, nor would he come down to see me. The doorman called up to his apartment and relayed the message that Crazy Secretive Guy wanted me to leave the sleeping bag with the doorman and go.

His strangest attempt at keeping a secret, however, occurred right around the time we were assigned to advisors. The way that worked in my department was that every professor in the market for a grad student gave a presentation, and then every grad student in the market for an advisor wrote down his or her top three advisor choices on a super-secret ballot and turned it in to the department head. In my particular class, we did not discuss our advisor choices among ourselves ahead of time. This was because all ten of us appeared to want the same two advisors which was awkward, as we couldn’t all work for the same two people.

But after the advisor assignments were handed out, I ran into Crazy Secretive Guy in the computer lab. I asked him who he would be working for. He hemmed and hawed a bit, and then he changed the subject. He wouldn’t tell me who his advisor was.

For the benefit of any readers unfamiliar with the nuances of graduate school, I feel that I should stress that the identity of your advisor is not really something that you can keep secret. His name is usually right there on the door of your lab. It’s the last name on your papers, and he signs your thesis. It’s sort of public knowledge. So what Crazy Secretive Guy hoped to gain by the few extra hours of secrecy, I couldn’t say.

Eventually, Crazy Secretive Guy decided that engineering grad school wasn’t his thing and went off to law school. He got married shortly after that. Needless to say, none of us were invited to the wedding.

Baseball fans can be geeky too

Speaking of arguing about the semantics of limits, I had what boiled down to the same conversation with father about how to keep track of how many games ahead or behind one baseball team is from another. My father explained it to me, and, although he did teach me to keep track of team placement, I can’t remember exactly what my father said, I just know how understand it. For me, each game is worth one game, or point. The team that wins game gets half a point, and the team that loses the game loses half a point. That way, if two teams play each other, the one that winning team gains a whole game over the loser, which makes sense, and also allows for keeping track of teams that don’t play each other.

So when my father explained it to me, I thought about it, and told him how I understood it. He got all upset, and said, “No, it’s not like that.”

“But it works,” I said.

Again, just like my high school calculus teacher, he was stumped by this fact. He considered my technique, applying it to theoretical baseball teams, saw that it worked, and said, “Well, fine, it may work to keep track of team placement, but that’s not how it really works. The games aren’t worth ‘points,’ for one thing.”

“But the entire purpose is to keep track of placement, so if it works to keep track of placement, then it works, right?” I said.

“Look,” my dad told me. “I don’t care how you keep track in your head, just don’t tell people you are assigning ‘points’ like that, OK?”

“OK,” I said, rolling my eyes. And Baseball Cap Guy reacted in much the same way when I told him my team-tracking technique. So I guess it’s just not kosher. But for any of you out there who could never understand limits or baseball team standings before, try my way.

And like a phoenix, it rose from the ashes

The Doktah was a recipient of a prestigious graduate fellowship from the Whitaker foundation. Whitaker fellowships are awesome, because they include a certain amount of money every year expressly for computer purchases. I think it’s $1000 or so, and if you don’t spend it on computer accoutrements, you lose it. So, in her first year as a Whitaker fellow, The Doktah bought herself a desktop computer.

The Doktah was very generous with her stuff, and she set the new computer up in the lab and gave us all permission to use it. At the time, there were not enough computers to go around in the lab, so this was a pretty sweet deal. The Doktah had only a few rules to go along with the use of her computer:
1. The Doktah had priority of its use.
2. No one was allowed to install or download any programs without The Doktah’s permission.
3. No one at all was allowed to install Napster.
4. For the love of God, no Napster.

See, this was back when Napster was free and legal, but some people were apparently using it towards illegal ends. You may have heard something about it. But The Doktah found that, anytime Napster was installed on her computer, it got really screwed up.

She uninstalled it over and over, and spoke to the person responsible many times. Eventually, she stopped finding Napster installed on her computer. But the Napster-like problems persisted. She realized that the guilty party was installing Napster at night, downloading songs, and then uninstalling the program. He thought that he would get away with it that way, but her computer went screwy anyway.

Then one day, The Doktah was working on some data analysis and suddenly her file was gone. Poof! Gone! She went into the C-drive to look for it, and found that her files were scattered haphazardly all throughout her computer with new names and file extensions. Tension mounted.

The Doktah figured she might have gotten a virus on there, so she went to click on the icon for her virus software. “Um,” she said, “why is my auto-protect turned off?” Someone had turned off her automatic virus protection without her knowledge or consent.

She turned it back on and started a scan, but she had to stop it at 10,000 viruses found, because the software couldn’t handle it. She called the IT people, and there was a lot of congregating and discussing of options. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that her hard drive had to be wiped. Reformatted. Erase everything, start again.

But first The Doktah had to back everything up. And, thanks to one of the 10,000 viruses, this was no easy matter. Since all her files were moved all over the place, she had to go into every file directory by hand, change the name of the file, and copy it to a CD. One at a time. And she thought reanalyzing data was bad.

We never figured out who shut off the virus protection or why. Our best guess was that someone using the computer, probably downloading songs through Napster, found the little announcements of “file infected” annoying. Sort of like the people in this town who shut off their carbon monoxide detectors because they won’t stop beeping.

Shh, I'm working

The Easter of my last year of school, I took over the responsibility of writing the annual Easter Poem. Every year, the Easter Bunny a poem for one of the kids to read aloud, which is followed by instructions to a treasure hunt. In my youth, I marveled at the Easter Bunny’s ability to ring the doorbell at my aunt’s house and then just vanish, but as I got older, I began to notice certain similarities in the Easter Bunny’s poetic style compared to that of my aunt’s, who sometimes has reason to treat us to poems of her own. Eventually I put two and two together and realized that he must help her write hers.

At any rate, I have always had a talent for writing Dr. Seuss-type rhymy sing-songy poems, just like my aunt, so I always knew I would be the one to take over – um – transcribing the Easter Bunny’s poems when my aunt retired from the duty. And so I did.

Around this point, Baseball Cap Guy and I had to attend a seminar. I brought a notebook with me. I made an effort to pay attention to the talk, but within a few minutes I was working on the poem. When I was stuck on a rhyme, I would gaze at the speaker apparently concentrating on what she was saying, but actually thinking, “Year, here, clear, deer, fear, near, we’re…”

On the way back to lab, I told Baseball Cap Guy that I had made some real progress in my Easter poem. “That’s what you were doing?” he said. “I thought you were taking notes! You made me all paranoid, and I ended up taking tons of notes myself!”

Since this entry falls kind of flat, I will now grace you with some sample stanzas a la the Easter Bunny. The first one I remember from that Easter in particular, but the last two I whipped off just now.

Another year gone?
My goodness, time flies!
Why do you kids get big
While I stay the same size?

But Rudolph is shaking
His bells; this, I know,
Is a sign that he feels
It is now time to go.

So I left a great hunt!
Good luck with the search.
I’m off before Rudolph
Leaves me in the lurch.

At one point, I used the expression, “Beard the lion in its den” in front of The Doktah and Bitter Guy. They accused me of making it up. “No!” I said. “That’s a real expression!”

“Oh, come on,” they said. “You bearded the lion in its den? You expect us to believe that means something?”

“Look it up!” I told them. So they did. It turns out that the Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines the transitive verb “to beard” as:

¹to confront and oppose with boldness, resolution, and often effrontery
or
²to furnish with a beard.

Needless to say, there was much merriment made of definition two, and we immediately instituted the policy of using “noun me” to mean “furnish me with a noun.”

Also needless to say is that there was much gloating done by me about the existence of the phrase, “beard the lion in its den.” Granted, I am used to people my age questioning the legitimacy of certain phrases that are a part of my vocabulary. Because apparently, I have the slang vocabulary of an eighty-year-old woman. I have been known to say, without irony, “dang,” “cripes,” “new digs [in reference to an apartment],” and “criminey.”

But the crowning glory is my use of the phrase, “Now we’re cooking with gas!”

Seriously, that’s a real expression. I didn’t make that up.

Linebacker, grad student… same difference

I was talking to Bitter Guy, and I mentioned to him that I have a very hard time finding button down shirts that fit. “I must have wide shoulders or something, because they’re always too tight there,” I said.

“Yeah, Scottish Guy and I were just talking about that the other day,” Bitter Guy replied.

I was a tad alarmed by this. “You and Scottish Guy were talking about my having large shoulders?” I asked him. I knew that my shoulders were wide, but I didn’t know they were topics of conversation for people who weren’t me.

“Well, yeah,” Bitter Guy said.

“Dear God, how big are they?” I cried.

Bitter Guy tried to reassure me. “No, no. We were just talking about how people who work out tend to have large shoulders, and then you came up as an example because you do tae kwon do.”

Despite his consoling tone, I still felt a bit ruffled. Especially since my shoulders were wide long before I started doing tae kwon do.

Microscopy is not for the faint of heart

One last Eccentric Postdoc story before I switch gears. Eccentric Postdoc was really a nice lady, despite her eccentricities, many of which were due to cultural and language barriers. I’m sure we seemed equally weird to her. Especially those of us who appeared to be witches. And Eccentric Postdoc also helped me learn the best way to do immunofluorescent staining of my cell cultures, so I can forgive a lot of eccentricities for that.

Immunofluorescent staining of cells is a fairly exhausting time-intensive experiment. When I first learned the procedure, I was taught a protocol for single-day experiments. This turned out to be a bad way to do it. The staining involved about five hours of washing and incubation, followed by microscopy work. The first time I did the experiment, I, like many before me and many after me, thought that the hard work was done by the time I got to the microscope, and all that was left was snapping a few pictures. Oh, the naivete. Experienced grad students know that microscopy work is actually very difficult. There’s a lot of scanning, adjusting, focusing, and switching of filters that takes much longer than a novice might expect. And our lab had the added challenge of combating the microscope gremlins who came in every night to misalign the lamp and loosen all the screws. Eventually, I learned to allot at least thirty minutes on the microscope per sample, even though I was only trying to get five images from each one. I also learned to make sure I signed up for the scope an hour or two early so that I could realign the lamp and tighten all the screws.

But when Eccentric Postdoc started working in our lab, I had not yet learned how to streamline my microscope experience. So with the single-day staining protocols, I faced hours of microscopy work at the end of a very long day of staining cells. One night, I was in the process of trying to mount my samples to a glass slide for the first time. Up to that point, I had been doing the microscopy on wet samples still in the dishes. With wet samples, after taking the micrographs, there was nothing to do but throw the samples away. Mounted samples, on the other hand, could be saved in the refrigerator for future observation, a much safer scenario. Unfortunately, I was having some difficulty with the mounting gel. I had followed the directions, but in the microscope, the cells looked smushed. I know now that I didn’t let the gel dry for long enough, but at the time I didn’t understand why I couldn’t see anything. Enter Eccentric Postdoc.

Eccentric Postdoc wanted to help. She helped me readjust the lab’s microscope. She helped me re-mount my samples. She brought me over to another lab where she sometimes worked to try their microscope. At first, I was grateful for the assistance, but after about an hour of fruitless searching for decent cells, I was ready to call it a day. Eccentric Postdoc would have none of it.

“Oh, well,” I kept saying. “I guess it didn’t work this time. I’ll try again tomorrow.”

“Nooo,” Eccentric Postdoc intoned. “We will try again.” And then she’d reset the microscope stage with another sample, and I would cry a little inside.

This was a difficult problem to deal with, because she was acting solely on my behalf. It really was in my best interest to acquire usable data from the experiment I had already invested so much time into. But I was also facing what The Doktah and I called, in calculus terms, “a globally bad, locally good” situation. Yes, in the long term, I would be happy to have data. But in the short term, I would have been thrilled to stop working, go home and sleep. I had already been at the lab for ten or so hours, and I really needed a break. But Eccentric Postdoc just would not quit. Those cells were going to be observed, dammit.

Finally, after a lot of wasted time – time in which I appeared to be trying to solve the problem, but was actually thinking, “please let me stop please let me stop please let me stop” – we determined that my samples were not salvageable. I had, as previously noted, not let the gel mount dry, so the cells got smeared across the coverslip when I tried to use the oil objective to observe them. The experiment was a wash, but I did learn a few things. First, I learned give the gel mount at least two hours to set before observing the cells. Second, I learned not to ask Eccentric Postdoc for help if I secretly wanted to quit. And third, Eccentric Postdoc showed me a better way to do the staining that spread the experiment over two days, which gave me one 4-hour followed by one 8-hour day instead of one 10-hour-without-a-break day. A vast improvement.

Buses, taxis, and witches

Speaking of Eccentric Postdoc, she spent the better part of two years believing that The Doktah and I were witches. Let me explain.

The three of us and The P.I. were attending a conference in San Francisco. Because we flew out the day the conference began, we went straight from the airport to the conference center. At the end of the day, The P.I. headed off to his parents’ house where he was staying for the duration of the conference. Eccentric Postdoc, The Doktah and I, however, had reservations at a local hotel.

I had made these reservations, and, in the interest of saving money, I had tried to find a cheaper hotel than the ones right in the conference center area. Because I didn’t want to be too far away, I called the hotels I was considering to ask them how close they were to the Moscone Center. One place was pretty inexpensive, and the person on the phone told me they were only a ten-minute walk from the conference center. “Great!” I said, and booked a room.

So the three of us picked up our bags from the coat check at the conference and went outside into the dark San Francisco night to try to figure out how to get to the hotel. None of us had ever been to San Francisco before; this combined with our jet lag and fatigue from attending lectures all day made for three rather groggy, confused people. Three groggy, confused people longing to take showers, actually. So The Doktah and I were all for hailing a cab to get us to the hotel. We could figure out a cheaper way to and from in the morning, but at that moment, we just wanted to get there.

Have you ever tried to hail a cab on a Saturday night in front of the Moscone Center just as a conference is ending? It’s not so easy. But we had no idea where the hotel was in relation to the center, and we had no idea what buses might go by the hotel, so we were pretty much stuck trying to hail a cab. The Eccentric Postdoc, however, did not agree.

“We should walk, I think,” she said, in her usual slow style of speech. “There is no taxi.”

“But we don’t know how to get there,” I told her patiently. I knew that English was her second language, and I tried to be patient. “We can’t walk, because we don’t know where the hotel is.”

She nodded, apparently satisfied with this explanation. But thirty seconds later she said, “I think we should just walk.”

I swallowed a sigh of aggravation, and said, “We can’t walk. We don’t know where the hotel is. We have no map.”

“But I think we will not get a taxi,” she persisted. “So I think it is better if we just walk.”

Bear in mind that this was the end of a very long day of plane travel followed by hours of seminars. So it is not unreasonable that I got annoyed pretty quickly. “We cannot walk there,” I explained, very testily. “We have no idea where it is. We don’t even know what direction to walk in. We can’t walk.”

Pause.

“But I think we should walk,” she began again.

I lost all semblance of patience. “We don’t know where it is!” I shouted. “If you want to walk, fine! We’ll meet you there!”

Fortunately, at this point The Doktah succeeded in finally hailing a cab, and we climbed in gratefully. The cab then took us on a confusing circuitous route through the city, and I began to have suspicions about the “ten minute walk” from the hotel to the Moscone Center. When we got to the hotel, we asked at the front desk if there was a bus, and they gave us a schedule. It turned out that the Moscone Center was not so much a ten-minute walk from the hotel as it was a 45-minute bus ride. But, you know, same difference.

The hotel room was basically fine, although it smelled a bit wonky. But there was a shower and beds, so we were pretty happy with it, all in all. There was also a TV, so The Doktah and I were able to indulge our Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel habits while at the conference. Poor Eccentric Postdoc just had to deal with it. She must have been hugely relieved the one night we stayed out sort of late and she got to shut out the lights and go to slep early.

The Doktah also happened to be reading a book about vampires or something on that particular trip. I think that after seeing us watch Buffy and Angel, which made no sense to her at all because of her struggling English, the book tipped the balance for Eccentric Postdoc. It seems that when we got back home, Eccentric Postdoc told The P.I. that The Doktah and I were witches. I think he just let her continue to think so.

Man, that trip must have been really bad for her.

Fire? What fire?

One time I left the lab and noticed a horrible, loud, pulsing, buzzing noise. Terrible sound. I was willing to do anything necessary in order to stop hearing the sound. This, as it turned out, was a good thing, because the horrible sound was the fire alarm. The fire alarm which I did not hear while in the lab.

Being the thoughtful person that I am, I went back into the lab to tell people that the fire alarm was going off, and that we should leave. Eccentric Postdoc said, “No, it is a drill, I think.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think they always tell us when it is a drill, and they didn’t this time.”

“No, there is no fire. It is a drill, I think. No fire,” she said. Because she was Eccentric Postdoc, she just kept repeating herself, very slowly. “Nooo, no fire. Just drill.”

“It might be a fire!” I said. “We don’t know. I don’t think it’s a drill. We should probably leave.”

“Nooo. It is a drill, I think. I do not want to leave. There is nooo fiiiire,” she kept saying.

“There might be!” I said again, and then gave up. I had done what I could to save her from a fiery doom. “Well, I’m leaving. I just thought you should know that the alarm is going off. You do what you want.” I left through The P.I.’s office, and told him on the way that the alarm was ringing, and that we should leave. He grunted at me and kept typing. I threw up my hands in exasperation and headed outside to avoid the possible raging fire.

Do you remember the horse in Animal Farm? The one who just kept repeating, “I will work harder!” until he dropped dead? Well, The P.I. and Eccentric Postdoc got off lucky that time, because there was no fire. But unless they adjust their “Must! Work!” attitudes, I don’t know. It’s a short trip to the glue factory. Me, I feel that the best plan of action when a fire alarm is ringing is to leave the building, even if you’re in the middle of a sentence in your grant proposal.

The story has a happy ending, though. I mean other than the happy news that there was no fire and no one died. I went down to see my old friends in Operations, and told them that we couldn’t hear the fire alarm while inside our lab. They were horrified and installed an alarm inside the lab that was so loud, there was no way we could ignore it and stay inside, even if there was noooo fiiiire.

Pitch black

The power went out in the lab one time. Baseball Cap Guy was sitting at his bench, pipetting something, and there was sudden darkness. I’m talking, complete, utter, no-light-at-all, windowless basement darkness. The kind of darkness where you begin to believe that light doesn't even exist, that it was merely a figment of your imagination. Now, recall that the lab was cramped, overcrowded, and spilling over with chairs. The lab was also full of very expensive machines, sharp needles and razor blades, biohazardous and toxic substances, and many corners jutting out at odd angles. And the lab was lacking a clear path to the door. Because of the chairs. So Baseball Cap Guy had no choice but to remain still, holding the pipettor, and hope that the lights would come back on or that someone would at least open the door and maybe let a little light in so that he could leave. He couldn’t even put down the pipettor because he might put it on an errant razor blade, or more likely, accidentally spill his petri dishes all over the place.

The Doktah and I came in about fifteen minutes later, after the lights came back on. When the power went out, we hadn't even really noticed for the first ten minutes or so because it was daytime and we weren’t using a computer at that moment. So when we saw Baseball Cap Guy sitting at the bench we said, “Hey, did you know the power went out?”

“Yeah. I noticed.”

Well, it didn’t just spring out fully formed from the earth

Bitter Guy found a sort of not-sold-in-stores kind of bendy wrench thing in the tool chest in the lab. He got all excited, held it up and said, “Someone invented this!”

He had left out the critical phrase “someone that The P.I. knows.”

Everyone should be tidy when they eat

Let me tell you about my thesis proposal. It was quite a time in my life. The stuff of nightmares, really. Actual nightmares. People have literally dreamed that this happened to them.

I gave my thesis proposal in my third year of grad school, having spent two and a half years working on my project, doing experiments, gathering data. The night before I was supposed to hand in the written proposal to my committee, which was two weeks before the oral presentation, The P.I. was reading it over for editing purposes. That’s when it happened.

“This calculation,” he said. “Are you sure about the units? Can I see the spreadsheet?” So we looked at the spreadsheet on the computer. And you know what we found? We found that in my spreadsheet, the spreadsheet which I used over and over to analyze two and a half year’s worth of data, was wrong. It seems that I had multiplied some numbers by 10^-9 Newtons, but called them pico-Newtons. The problem? Pico- is 10^-12. That’s three orders of magnitude off. The numbers I was reporting were actually one thousand times larger than I was claiming them to be. And with the correct units, none of the numbers made any sense at all. Essentially everything I had done so far in the lab was wrong.

So on this, the worst night of my career, we went back and examined the raw data, which was on videotape. We found the source of the problem: My major experiment on which my entire thesis was to be based, was flawed. I won’t go into the technical details here (you’re welcome), but long story short, some fluid was flowing where it wasn’t supposed to be flowing. I was trying to measure force, and this extra fluid flow made it impossible to measure.

I ended up asking my committee members if I could give them my written proposal late (no problem since most committee members don’t read thesis proposals until the night before the presentation, if that early), and I spent the next few days desperately trying to salvage some information from the data on the videotapes. I made some estimations to make the old data presentable, and we came up with another way to do the experiment which would use the extra fluid flow as an advantage. But it was a truly awful two weeks.

I don’t remember much from the actual presentation. Just two things, really. The first is when, during the closed-door question and answer period, one of my committee members said, “Why are you even doing this at all?” (He sort of apologized for it later.)

The other thing I remember is about the French post doc from our lab. I had provided pizza and sodas because it’s always wise to bribe your committee, although The Doktah and I think that turkey, box o’ wine, and warm cream is the best thing to serve at a thesis proposal or defense. The food was all on a table down at the front of the room where I was presenting. French Post Doc was late, so in order to avoid disturbing anyone, he came quietly down to the food table, got on his hands and knees, and crawled in front of the table, out of my line of view. The next thing that I saw was French Post Doc’s hand reaching up to the table. He groped for a plate, then came back up for one, two slices of pizza. Sated, he crawled back to the side of the room, and I thought it was all over.

But then the hand came back, groping, and grasping on the tabletop. He’d forgotten to get a napkin.