Friday at last

It's Friday, and for once I can look forward to the weekend because I refuse to come to lab to do any work. Well, I need to come in for 1/2 hour to thaw some cells but that doesn't count. I'm looking forward to spending time with my fiance. With the crazy hours I worked up to my last committee meeting I haven't seen much of him. We spent Easter weekend together but not much more than that.

Today was pretty uneventful. My boss was ignoring me. And trust me, this isn't a bad thing. He is hard to describe to other people. You get to know him more by hearing the stories. The most general term that one of my lab mates and I can come up with is psychotic. And this really doesn't encompass what and who he is. Here is a quick summary of the kind of PI that he is:

• He has mood swings worse than a woman with PMS.
• When irritated with a female student, and I stress female, he suggests that we should quit with a Masters. This is after we had been in this hell hole for more than 4 years working for a Ph.D. There are two of us (female students) and there used to be a lot of conflict between the two of us, until we started bonding over the hatred for our boss. We also feel that part of the reason he is this way is because his wife wears the pants in the family so he takes out his frustrations on the only females that he can - us.
• He doesn't care how you get the 'expected, positive' results, just that you get them.
• Optimizing an assay is unheard of, let's just jump in vivo!
• He looks to a student (who I will refer to as LB) for advice. This said student knows nothing, does just about nothing, and what he does, he does wrong. But gets accolades for everything. I will elaborate on this in the future. There is waaaaay too much to talk about now.
• LB is the only student permitted to collaborate with others. Most of us have no publications. I for one, was told that I shouldn't look for a postdoc position in research because it looks bad that I don't have any. Well whose fault is that! He controls what I'm allowed to work on and what I can publish!
• He gave me a very poor student review where one of the things mentioned was that he had been unhappy with my performance for 18 months. Forget the fact that 12 months ago I received glowing review from him.
• He lies to the chairperson of our department and the rest of the world about how much work LB does. LB is permitted to put his name first on the poster because he is 'presenting' the poster, not because he did most of the work.
• He fired our lab manager of over three years via email.
• He doesn't have enough funding to keep me or my lab mate but LB can "hang around" for eighteen months not doing much of anything because he didn't get accepted to medical school AND he's trying to hire two postdocs.

I can go on, and on, and on but that's enough for now. You get the general idea. So it wasn't a bad thing that he was ignoring me today, actually it's more of avoidance. He didn't respond to my morning email requesting a meeting next week to go over my data. I have to email all my correspondences with him so I have a written record - he's been known to lie. It's actually comical, the boss avoiding the student. Usually it's the other way around in this place.

I had to work in the hood room with LB today. There are two hoods in that room. He tries to have a 'nice' conversation and I don't know why. He's knows I don't like him. It used to be awkward because we used to be friends, before he started acting like an ass. I do feel better about one thing though. It always drove me nuts and I wanted to beat him when he talks about our boss because he refers to him as "The Fearless Leader." He's definitely not either. However, one of my friends pointed out to me today that it isn't really a compliment. The Fearless Leader was a character in the cartoon Rocky & Bullwinkle. A leader who thought he was but wasn't really very good. The description on a website about the cartoon refers to the character as someone who

has no hesitations in offing co-workers that have done him wrong. He's considered the ultimate badnik of the entire country, and does nothing to hide his ambitions to rule the world. . . . He continues to send his special agents . . . around the world to obtain his riches and secret information.

He definitely tries to crush his students, he's definitely the "ultimate badnik," he wants to rule the science world, and LB is his secret agent. He often spies on us for the boss, reporting back to him things we say and do. So no matter how LB may act, I have to watch what I say around him about the boss. At least his time in the hood was brief. I try to keep our interactions at a minimum because even hearing his voice puts me a bad mood.