Meh and you too.

The request was to expand on the 5 big W questions + 1: what, who, where, when, why and how.

So I'll start with a secret: this is the seed of all writing. So I could write something for this topic over and over and write something different each time.



1. What

"What do I do now?" I've been struggling a lot with this question about what do I want to do. I've been through this once before, and that's how I ended up doing science.

So I think I've covered heart and head. What's next? Gut feeling?

I feel like doing science for so long has had two contrasting effects on me:

1) It made me braver, and made me realize courage is not really an area where I'm lacking
2) It put me relatively out of touch with my own gut feelings.

The thing about science is that you're taught not to be superstitious, that hunches don't count unless you can explain them with data, and that you should often ignore your gut feeling, especially if your gut is telling you to run away from public speaking or doing animal work.

Right?

Truthfully, I think my best weapons in science were my gut feelings. But I was told to ignore them, that I was being paranoid about the people I worked with (who were every bit as crazy and back-stabbing as I feared), and that I was making logical leaps (all of which turned out to be right once I had the evidence to demonstrate my hunches were good).

And I wouldn't have done science at all if I had listened to my gut feelings way back when I interviewed for graduate schools.

Regardless, my goal now is to spend a lot of quality time focusing on my gut feelings.




2. Who

"Who is going to help me?"

At this point I'm not sure if anyone can help me figure out what I want to do, but once I figure that out, I will probably need help to do it.

One thing I fucked up royally in my science "career" (according to the blamers) was not getting the right help from the right people. I realized too late that I needed help from different people, but I couldn't figure out

a) who were the people with both the interest and the power to help me, and
b) how to get them to be interested in helping me

Also, "Who are the people I want to work with?"

This is something I'm focused on right now. I really hated most of my coworkers for a long time in science, maybe because we weren't really coworkers at all, just competitors pretending to be polite. The whole system was set up so that there was never enough to go around, and we were basically trying to climb over each other to get to the good stuff: the money, the attention from our advisor, the jobs.

So I'm wondering who are the kinds of people I can work with? Would I be better off with more creative types? Should I just steer clear of male-dominated careers? Am I better off doing the kinds of things where everyone works independently but in parallel? Are there any careers anymore where there's plenty to go around? Or does this economy pretty much preclude that from happening at all?



3. Where

Also known as, "Will I have to relocate?"

I like where I am now. I am learning new things, slowly, and the pace is more or less up to me. But what if I decide the thing I most want to do in life is something I can only learn in a city far away? Am I going to make MrPhD go with me? Is there anything I want to do so badly that I'd make him quit a job he loves to follow me on a hunch about my next big thing?




4. When

Yes, when. When will I figure this out. When will I feel better. When will the bolt of lightning strike me down, or give me that aha! moment I could use right about now?

One thing I'm certain I'll miss about science are the aha! moments. I loved that. I loved problem solving, I loved getting new data, I loved finding something unexpected in the middle of an experiment designed to look at something else, I loved reading a paper and having so many ideas I had to scribble them all down excitedly.

The good news is there are other kinds of aha! moments, and I wish I had the perspective to realize that years ago. They are there when I cook, and when I shop for gifts, and when I read good books. When I listen to really good music. And when I write.

But mostly I want to know when I will stop having dreams about the bastards who fucked me over in science. I am so tired of the nightmares where I have to go back and work with them again, or I find out one of them is taking credit for everything I did in his lab, even though it was my idea, etc.




5. Why

The one I'm doing the most lately is "Why is this happening to me? Why do people say I chose this? Did I choose this, really? Why would I do that to me?"

Also known as,

6. How

"How did I end up here?"

I keep retracing my steps and saying "No, I couldn't possibly have known any better at the time, I actually got a lot of bad advice, or people seemed to think I could figure it out from obscure hints, and I didn't. I didn't figure it out until it was too late."

I made a lot of mis-steps. One foot in front of the other, right?

But it's pretty much impossible for me to see how I could have known to do any differently, given where I came from, my family, and a general lack of good advice.

Does that make me feel any better? Only slightly.

Also, "How do I move forward and get on with my life?"

From a comment

MYTH:

If you love what you do, you'll rise to the top decile in any profession.

Anyone who has watched a reality tv show (take ANTM or Project Runway for example) knows that how much you love what you do has almost nothing to do with whether you will be in the "top decile".

Optimism is for suckers.

So this week, as you'll recall, I had that moment of thinking, well I should really give it another try, being more positive.

It was sort of nice to talk to my therapist again and have her say,

YES, WHAT YOU'RE TELLING ME IS REALLY FUCKED UP. NO WONDER YOU'RE UPSET.

Validation is usually kind of reassuring. I thought yeah, it's not just me. It's my environment. It's these wackos I work with.

So I decided to try, as I mentioned in my last post, thinking maybe this is the darkest before the dawn. Or whatever.

So that lasted like, 2 days.

Today I'm trying to remember if anything good happened. I guess it's good that I'm only mildly annoyed that my experiments are not working as well as I hoped.

And I sort of pretended like today was Friday. So I'll go in tomorrow like it's Saturday.

Get it? Saturday. Hahahaha.

So I actually had a couple of days this week when I was kind of excited to get up and see if something worked. And I thought "oohh, maybe I'll get some data!"

And I had an idea in the shower one morning for a cool twist on an experiment that might yield more information than the way I was originally planning to do it... I love those moments. The aha moments.

And I'm kind of glad that I did manage to reproduce (convincingly!) one of the interesting results I got a little while back.

So that's good I guess... I should probably be more excited about it.

Um, yay. (How was that? Yay?)

But lately I have this feeling that I'm just amassing a ton of data that will never be published and therefore, none of it really exists or contributes anything to the progress of science.

Yeah, you know the feeling, don't you?

Mostly I'm annoyed because a positive pilot result I got a week or two ago has not held up to further testing. There are lots of variables, I'm still testing, but when the best case scenario is that your system is ultra-sensitive to lots of variables? That's a bad scenario.

And while in my "okay, I am troubleshooting and trying to be optimistic" mode, I had just about convinced myself I could deal with a career issue that I can't blog about.

I had come to accept how to try to be optimistic about it even though I wasn't feeling very optimistic. Or at least, I figured, I could be realistic and just take it in stride and keep going.

And then I found out why I shouldn't have bothered trying to have a good attitude.

Here's the ugly secret that is the main purpose of this blog:

There is always, always ALWAYS something else going on behind the scenes in science.

Don't let anybody tell you otherwise.

Your worst paranoias can't even begin to cover it.

That feeling you get that people are talking about you or your work behind your back?

Well, they are. What's really sickening is, nobody tells you this until you've been doing it long enough to feel well and trapped:

They're allowed to. It's built right in. It's part of the way the system works.

This is the kind of shit that makes me want to quit science and just be done with it. Somehow I just can't stand it being so fucked up.

I don't care what you say, I don't think I can get used to it or accept it or whatever you call "growing up." Somehow I'd rather go work on something I don't care about. I think that would be easier than watching something I actually really do value turn out to be, you know, completely false and evil.

Oh, which reminds me, one small light of sanity in my week: I got home in time to watch the Rachel Maddow show today. I love Rachel Maddow. And I find it absolutely hilarious when they show those group shots of her with the other 5 white guys, er I mean, all of them with their short hair and she's as close to a woman as they could bring themselves to allow. I mean, sheesh. But she's so darn cute!

And in other angry, depressing news, I had to give up on mentoring at one of our new postdocs. I say "at" because she asked me for advice repeatedly, and I tried to be honest and really did enjoy talking with her, but she apparently took none of my advice.

This was confirmed for me today and I realized I was really kind of disgusted. Why do I waste my fucking time on these people? Should I just assume it's all an act? Why do they bother ASKING? I don't have time for this shit. But I hate assuming that. Some of them are genuinely grateful and I'm glad to help. But not this one.

It's really fucking hard to try to be upbeat about things when on the one hand, some people are saying your work is great and everything is going to be okay if you'll just cheer up, and on the other hand, some snothead in your lab is clearly sending the message that she thinks you're an idiot-loser.

Oh, I know she's an arrogant little twit and she'll find out the hard way (hopefully).

But something about watching the cycle repeat itself just makes me sick. I've really only known one or two grad students who were this bad, but not postdocs.

I guess I thought that if grad school had one thing going for it, it's kicking the living daylights out of most of the arrogant twits who think they know more than anyone.

I know that's not really true, but you know what I mean. If you can get through grad school with your arrogance fully intact, that's pretty impressive (or pathological).

Oh and in other news, one of my best friends on campus here got a job and is leaving soon. I might have mentioned this in a past blog post. I'm kind of depressed about it, for purely selfish reasons. Somehow he figured out how to get what he wanted to move his life along, and I'm still stuck here. And it definitely sucks losing one of my closest allies.

Meanwhile, my still-unemployed friend had what seemed like an almost-offer to do what she's actually really trained to do... after what she described as an awesome interview...

But it turned out that the company had also interviewed a guy who was a friend of someone in the company... and guess who they had already offered it to before they invited my friend to interview?

So it didn't matter what she did, the job was already his. Only she didn't know that.

In other words, if it were a level playing field, we wouldn't mind if we lost fair and square. But it's not level, and it's not fair.

And one of the things that pisses me off the most about that is having to work with a bunch of snot-nosed kids who still think it is.

Or maybe I'm just in a really fucking bad mood today?

Oh, the irony.

After I wrote that post yesterday I sucked it up, went through the motions of finishing a few minor things that absolutely had to get done*, and left a little earlier than usual.

And amazingly, I felt a lot better.

I went to the gym, I went home, I watched Shaun Johnson finally get a little of the gold she should have won earlier (if it weren't for the fucked up women's gymnastics judging).

This morning I felt okay, not too tired, and came to work knowing I have some Important Experiments To Do.








And then I got some news I really didn't want.








Obviously I can't blog the details here. But PhysioProf left another comment on my last post to the effect of, I wouldn't be in this situation if I had better mentor(s). And it's relevant so I'm going to write about that again here.








Basically, my "mentor" is a great mentor to some people in the lab.

But not others.

My impression is that there are not very many really great mentors out there, because it's all about having the right match. I think I've written this here before, but I'll write it again: nobody is a great mentor to everyone.

And here's another Newsflash: just because someone has had a few people come out of their lab and get jobs, does NOT mean they are a good mentor.

In larger labs, the PI is much too busy to mentor everyone. So the favorites get the mentoring, and the rest get to wait.

Or hang.

If we complain, we're told to be patient.

If the PI should realize later that they dropped the ball, at most we get a mumbled apology.

Yeah, how many years of my life can I get back with a mumbled apology?

I'll tell you: NONE.

How many career chances does a person get in science? Not many. If a cat has 9 lives, I think I'm on my last one.

And then comes the blame. It's all too easy for the busy PI to say, after they've dropped the ball, that we should have complained more (Um, you lectured me on how I have to be patient???).

It really is like battered wife syndrome. In more ways than one.

One of the things that really made me cry yesterday was that in my effort to figure out why the thought of quitting makes me cry, I read an interview with Liz Blackburn where she was saying "because science is worth it".

In that same article, she was saying how she was (like most women of her generation, Nancy Hopkins is a great example of someone who always says this) basically oblivious to sexism when she was younger, and how she thinks that's one of the big reasons she got through.

She said her mentees are very discouraged by it.

No kidding.

She also said the postdoc associations have been very helpful for her mentees, which made me laugh.

While they have been somewhat of a crutch for me at times when I thought that was all I needed, none of that can really solve my fundamental problems.

If anything, I see postdoc associations as a symptom of just how broken the system has become, that the postdocs have to organize ourselves because nobody else really gives a damn what happens to most of us.

And here we are, still trying to be naive and optimistic that we can fix anything by, what, taking care of our training ourselves because our PIs won't do it?

Probably we should be marching in the streets, but that's never going to happen, and even if it did, it's hard to believe anybody would care.

50,000 whiny PhDs? Oh please.

So today I have some Important Things To Do at the bench, but I'm really not in the mood to do anything, because of this overwhelming sense that nothing I do really matters, no matter how good it is, no matter how right I am, I will always be screwed over.

And none of it really matters, as far as I'm concerned I've done the experiments that really tested my hypothesis, and they worked, and I'm right.

So who cares if anybody else ever knows about it?

Who cares, indeed.

Lately one of my big hangups is that if I leave, my PI will probably take my project and claim it as an original idea.

A few people might know that it was mine, but they'll forget.

If I leave, nobody in my field or my family will try to stop me. Nobody will say,

But you have to publish that groundbreaking work!

My friends have been saying it for a while, but I think at this point they realize that, as one friend put it, staying in science is killing me.

She was being hyperbolic of course, I'm eating and sleeping and not any more depressed than I've always been.

I'm just having a hard time remembering what I'm doing this for. At one point, I actually cared about having something to prove, and proving it, because I thought I could convince people.

I think I'm over that fantasy now. You can lead a dead horse to water and beat it as hard as you want, but it still won't drink.







*although I'm pretty sure neither of my experiments worked

Why does the thought of quitting make me cry?

Today, I want to quit. I really really want to quit.

But for some reason, that makes me sad. I don't know why. I guess I feel defeated, or something, and I hate to think I'm quitting because I give up?

But I do give up. I am SO gave up. I don't have anything left to give. And I get nothing for it. So why should I keep doing it?

Do I want to quit for the wrong reasons?

Am I hating science because I'm not good enough at it? Or am I not doing as well as I could because I never liked science as much as the successful people do?

I'm definitely angry. It doesn't help that I've confirmed, in the last year, that contradictory data were deliberately left out of at least two papers whose conclusions I know to be false. And those papers are preventing me from publishing what I've been working on.

Yeah, that's fair. I'm angry that there's no justice in the world, but especially in science.

I pulled out some of my career change books that I re-read every few years (at the end of grad school, for example).

I guess this is the part where I go through and tick off transferable skills and think about what I want to do.

I've decided that what I hate most about science is the general lack of integrity. I'm watching grad students who will do anything to get their work published, even if they know their own data are crap. I'm watching PIs who will go to any lengths to hypocritically rationalize their unethical behavior.

Everyone just says it's "playing the game."

Ironically, so far this morning I got an email saying that something I ordered is coming in today or tomorrow; a collaborator sent me some reagents I needed; and a friend emailed me about a job opening in her department.

Once upon a time, those three things would have been enough to keep me going.

Meanwhile, my bench mates are crowded around a computer watching You Tube.

My PI is back to thinking my project is crap.

And I'm wondering how the hell I'm going to get through the day. I can't decide if it would be better to cry, or try not to.

Oh fuck it. Maybe I'll cry first, and then get on with pretending like I don't mind being here. No sense in quitting until I have health insurance lined up.

Exorcising.

Was feeling pretty broken yesterday. Not sure I feel much better today, but there's things to do and I have to be functional.

Read this post over at FSP and that made me feel a little better.

I guess the thing for me is not a lack of confidence per se but a feeling of always getting the rug yanked out from under me for not being good enough.

I was thinking about this yesterday and how I kind of have to blame my mom.

Yes, my mom. I often wonder if she has any clue how much she damaged me.

...


When I was little, my parents used to sign me up for some activity, and then let me do it for a while until they decided I wasn't that good at it.

And then they'd pull me out.

This happened with dance lessons, sports (of course, I sucked at sports), and with various musical instruments.

Basically, anything a little girl would enjoy doing.

But they wanted to find something I was the best at, I guess.

I ended up doing science in part because they thought I'd have a chance to be pretty good at it.

It occurred to me the other day that my parents never put any of my childhood artwork up on the walls or the refrigerator. Later, my mother would remark on how bad my art skills were when I had to draw anything for projects at school.

It's no wonder, years later, that I hate making figures!

Hard as I try, and all the 'rough spots' I've been through, I still sometimes find myself feeling like there's no point. That eventually someone will decide that my best isn't good enough, and it doesn't matter how much I enjoy research, what matters is that I have to compete. Constantly. Without end.

Compete, compete, compete.

And that, dear friends, is what sucks the life out of me.

But FSP is right. If persevering works, then persevering is what I'll do.

My job sucks.

Bad day.

Well, it's a new day, and nothing is working.

It's probably fixable- most bench things are, with enough time and elbow-grease (and sometimes money)- but I'm frustrated to the point of wanting to go home and cry.

But benchwork is not the only reason why.

...

Spent part of my day counseling yet another distraught grad student, who is being bullied by a sexist visiting professor in her lab. Her somewhat sexist advisor is nowhere to be found when she needs an authority figure to step in, and while her co-workers all agree that this guy's behavior is inappropriate, nobody will stand up for her or with her to either confront this guy or the advisor.

This is such an old story, but this poor student feels like we all feel when this happens:

Is it me (no)?
Am I alone in this (sort of)?
Is it because I'm a girl (probably)?
Is this what I can expect if I go into academia (or maybe the workforce in general) (yes)?

Is this worth putting up with (questionable)?

I wish I could go over there and give the advisor a piece of my mind, but I somehow doubt that would do any good (?). After all, I'm a Nobody.

Meanwhile, she can't get any work done because the bully is literally monopolozing her equipment, and sending her harrassing emails.

He's only there for 6 more months, so I told her that she's tough, if she has to she can suck it up. I gave her a bunch of other suggestions (including to document, document, document), but mostly I just hate that she has to go through this at all.

Perhaps most nauseating about this whole scenario is that she asked another postdoc what to do. This postdoc (whom I don't particularly like or respect) told her to just act sweet and stupid and do whatever he says to do. And then he will like her.

Thankfully, this grad student is more like me than this other postdoc. We agreed she would be setting a bad example and hating herself if she tried to 'act sweet.'

...

Worse than that for me on a personal level, the interview talks are starting up, which means I'm getting details on the people who are getting the interviews.

What's most sickening is that they aren't much different from me. They don't have more papers. Their projects aren't even that interesting.

What they do have is pedigree. Their papers are in Nature Something journals and always with famous co-authors.

I'm trying to be happy (?) that at least some of them are women.

...

In other news, while I'm thinking about going to industry, it's also because I'm worried that I'm either way too smart or way too efficient to be in academia.

(You're either standing in the shoes of a genius or a fool?)

Bear with me for a moment while I explain.

I agreed to host a speaker for a group.

I invited the speaker. Speaker agreed and we set a date, time and place and picked a title.

When I informed the group that this was all set, they were amazed that I had done this so quickly (it took 1 email, and 1 to confirm).

I was stumped, but pleased that they seemed impressed.

Some time goes by and we need to confirm the room. There's a staff member who is supposed to help print the flyers and book the food, etc.

Group Leader asked me to make the flyer. I said I thought the staff person did that, and I had already sent all the info that would go on the flyer (date, time, title).

Two more emails back and forth, I just made up the flyer and sent it, just because it wasn't worth the time to argue.

Eventually Group Leader writes back that Staff Person will make the flyer with the Logo.

I was thinking: Ok so you didn't send me a template, but now you're saying my flyer wasn't good enough? Does anybody even recognize the logo? I know I don't pay any attention to those things.

But I didn't say anything.

Now I am getting emails about the room. The room we wanted is booked. There are literally dozens of other rooms on campus we could use.

They are conferring amongst themselves about which room. Several emails about this. The most obviously available ones, they argue, are too hard to find.

I'm thinking: Um, is this a college campus? Shouldn't we assume that people are capable of reading a map? Or asking for directions?

But I don't say anything.

This is not a big event. The audience will definitely number less than a hundred, maybe less than 50, maybe less than 20, I don't know and I don't care. I wanted to see this speaker, I will be there.

All of this got me wondering, is this how academia does things? Because I am horrified at how inefficient it is. How pointlessly democratic. Do we really all need to agree on the logo? The flyer with the logo? The room? NO. We don't. It just has to be functional for what we want to do.

And I have to wonder what Group Leader and all the other group members do all day. Because it can't possibly be actually productive, actual work.

Another shitty day, and I still want to quit.

This morning in the shower I had all kinds of ideas for things to blog about, but now I can't remember what they were.

But here I am at work and I'm really tempted to just grab my purse, get in my car, and never come back. I don't care about abandoning my computer or all the hard work I've done here. I want to go somewhere tropical, assume a new identity, and work as a bartender. Nothing that has to do with science whatsoever.

I have lists of things I "should" be doing, but again today I'm flattened by the cumulative effect of feeling - nay, knowing - that nobody notices or cares what I do, that none of this suffering seems to add up to anything, that it has been getting worse and not better for a while now, and I can only expect more of the same with a very small chance of future improvement.

Nevermind that I actually made some progress on writing yesterday. Nevermind that I'm supposed to get excited about results, about reading other people's publications, about new ideas. It's not enough when it's in a vacuum.

It's definitely sucking the life out of me.

Except for one or two people, at this point my family and even my friends would rather see me quit. I love that they care more about me as a person than about, you know, anything I might contribute to science, but in a way that's like a vote of no confidence.

All I really need is someone who actually cares about my results to say, "But you can't quit now! We really need your contributions!"

I definitely don't hear that often enough.

More useless PI advice.

Okay, let's recap how this year has gone so far.

Had paper draft since year before. Was already sick of looking at paper.

Was more than sick of being asked what was going on with paper.

Submitted paper with overly grandiose claims to a journal where it wouldn't get in, based on overly optimistic advice of well-meaning PI.

Predictably, paper did not get in.

Had plenty of stamina to revise and plenty of time to send it elsewhere at that point, but no. PI wanted to try an even more ambitious plan, including augmenting paper with numerous uninformative and risky experiments.

Had a bad feeling about this, but wanted so dearly to believe that PI, with much more experience and wisdom, knows more than little MsPhD.

Experiments were done. Not much new could be concluded from them.

Paper is now much longer, arguably not much better, time has run out, and PI is now talking about sending it 'elsewhere' (meaning, the same level of 'elsewhere' where it could have been published in its original form many months ago).

PI won't even take a strong stand on which elsewhere, although some possibilities suggested a month or two ago were shot down.

The same possibilities so recently shot down are now regarded as perfectly reasonable.

When you can't even agree to continue to disagree, and the random changes of opinion occur too late to be useful, one has to wonder why anyone ever thought the apprenticeship model had anything to offer.

I gave up on it long ago.

Bad mood.

The weather is beautiful and I'm resenting having to be inside worrying about experiments that may or may not work. And for this particular batch of experiments, I only care about them if they work.

I'm having one of those days, everything is annoying me more than usual.

I'm trying to grab onto what's left of my patience to get my experiments done so I can avoid being around people after that. I hope.

This is one of those days, if somebody confronts me about anything, but particularly anything stupid, it will be hard not to tell them exactly where I think they should shove it.

Deep breaths, calm thoughts...

Tomorrow won't be better, I already know that, but it will be a different kind of annoying.

Unfortunately I don't really have any relaxing activities coming up, I'm looking at my calendar and it's pretty bleak. I can't seem to find that one hour a day that they say you should spend on rejuvenation (mental and physical).

Maybe the television ate it. And my little dog, too.

What's worst?

When I make lists, I can't help trying to put things in order. So in order of least annoying to most annoying thing that happened to me today, where would you rank these?

***

- Got <6 hours of sleep last night

- Getting a cold

- Getting cramps

- Can't seem to keep on top of basic chores like washing dishes and putting them away so there's room to wash more

- Equipment broken at work

- Wasting whole day to find that out... and realizing already wasted several days on preparing samples (and precious grant money to prepare samples)

- Collaborators who use crappy reagents and then send figures of that

- People who send gigantic attachments of things that don't need to be gigantic

- Departmental picnics where they require attendance... and then charge a fee for the food

- No mail for 3 days because postal worker seems to think the whole week is a holiday??

- Computer programs crashing

- Left my notebook at work so I can't decode my data

- 3 Netflix videos but none of them appealing right now

***

Maybe I'll just give up and go to bed. Tomorrow will likely be more of the same, but in theory getting some sleep will help with the top 3 things on this list, even if they're nowhere near the worst.

No more MsPhD nice guy.

Yup, that's it. I'm done. I'm no longer going to worry about helping certain people, because there will always be some of them.

You know, the ones who ask for your protocol, and ask you questions about it, and then don't follow it.

You find out they didn't follow it when they have a problem, and when you ask what they did, they say they did it a different way.

But they still want you to troubleshoot it for them.

Here's my answer:

DO IT MY WAY BECAUSE IT WORKS, YOU TWIT!! OR FUCK OFF!! YOUR CHOICE!!

Yeah. There's a special place in hell for those people.

It might, in fact, be time to make an updated version of lab hell. I may have to try to dig the old one up and optimize it.

Other than that, it was a perfectly decent day, except that...

I found out that despite having a calendar for a specific piece of equipment, nobody remembered that someone had apparently booked this thing I was planning to use later this week... on the day I was planning to use it.

It wasn't on the version of the calendar I had, so I'm wondering if it was really just an honest oversight, or if I got bumped. Either way, it screwed up my day today and more or less screwed up my whole week.

People who can't write on calendars get their own level of hell, too.

And the advisors who are always out of town and never reply to email? They get a nice toasty spot at the bottom, right next to the coals.

Notes from Idiot Land: I'm in a bad mood.

Days like this, I know I would rather be at home, but I can't leave yet, so I'm going to try to stay at my desk and not interact with anyone for as much of the day as possible.

Woke up after having paid my taxes thinking it really sucks that I make ~ $40,000 a year for this nonsense and work 10 hour + days during the week, and usually come in at least half a day on the weekends.

I wouldn't care much about the money, except when my clothes look crappy because I bought the shirt and pants for $20 each at Mervyn's, my shoes are totally scuffed and down at heel, and my house is a mess.

Then I wish I had a personal assistant to do the shopping and clean the house if I'm going to work this much.

But I can't afford that!

Then I got several emails this morning, including:

-A protocol from someone asking why this prep isn't working. The protocol makes no sense whatsoever, and I'm disgusted that this person doesn't know better than to waste time throwing good samples down the drain. I'm also disgusted that I now have to tell them EXACTLY what to do. This should be the PI's job, but as usual, I am doing everyone else's work and getting nowhere near as much credit as I deserve. I should be senior author on this paper for the amount of guidance I have given, but I will be lucky if I get 2nd author.

-A comment on some data from someone who is apparently blind, since everyone else who saw it agreed that the result was pretty obvious. I don't know what to say to them except, uh, look at it again with your eyes open??

-A letter I'm supposed to edit, asking for funding. The letter is written as one giant paragraph that even I don't have the patience to read in that format. I don't know why they think anyone would want to read it like that, much less give us money.

Then I walked by another lab having their lab meeting. We all know each other and are usually at least politely friendly, but everyone pretended like they either didn't see me, or their arms are broken. Hello, I am apparently not just grouchy but also invisible!

Then everyone in lab was crowded around some samples, arguing about what was going on, and it was clear that none of them knew what they were talking about. But I really don't have the patience to try to explain it to them today, partly because I know they don't care at all what I think.

Then a piece of equipment was broken that I needed to use, and I had to hack something together to make it work well enough for what I needed (my samples being rather labile, I couldn't afford to wait around). I have no idea when it will get fixed, as there's nothing I can do to speed the process.

And it's only noon.