My turn to be sick

Everyone seems to be getting sick around here lately. LB, Geeka, Geeka's boss, my fiance - now it's my turn. I feel like crap, I never used to get sick a lot but now I seem to catch everything everyone else always has. I think it's because I'm overworked and excessively tired, weakening my immune system.

I have a cold. I'm so devoid of energy I don't want to move, or think. I should be reading up on stuff for work but don't' feel like it. It sucks, no matter how crappy I feel I still have to go to work, even tomorrow, on a Sunday. I have slides to analyze for a Monday afternoon meeting.

Now my boss is talking crazy talk about how he knows we are trying to get me done "but". He's talking about generating a T cell clone. As I've repeated many times, he's lost his mind.

I wonder how many times the same person can lose his mind?

Missing the weekend

I had a wonderful weekend at home. I didn't realize how much I missed everyone and everything until I was there. I've decided I need to go home at least once a month to "depressurize." It did me good because I'm even handling the craziness at work better, and things have not gone well over all this week. And it's only Tuesday!

I live in the countryside, a wonderful rural area off the main highway down a dirt road. It's so peaceful there. It reminded me how much I miss living in the country, and that I'm not a city girl. The sun was shining, the birds were chirping, I could hear crickets outside my window at night. It was warm enough I could leave it open all night long. My drive there takes me through Amish country, right where I live. The Amish were plowing their fields with the horse hitches. It was a wonderful site. The drive home was even nice, I was driving directly into the setting sun and the sky was just ablaze with hues of red, yellow, and orange. It made me wish I had a camera to take a picture. It was so perfect.

We had a surprise birthday party for my sister over the weekend so I got to see most of my family on my mom's side. I miss them all.

However, now I'm back at work. Yesterday I talked LB into helping me with washing and autoclaving, which he then proceeded to start then NOT finish. I had a 20 min break to eat and while I stepped out, he left. He left the stuff in the autoclave room, not autoclaved. That wouldn't have been so bad but he didn't even bother to leave me a note. I didn't know he left and thought everything was getting done. I ended up doing it all this morning - and some of it twice! Some of the packets that were stacked didn't dry and were sopping wet. I had to do it over. I confronted him about leaving yesterday and he said he had to go home and write. He's working on a paper for someone in another lab and when he writes he like to do it at home. Bullshit. He doesn't write, never has and probably never will. Other people do it for him. I hate it when people lie. It's so juvenile and pointless.

I also got up early this morning so I could have blood processed before the faculty candidate seminar at noon. I overlayed the blood over histopaque then proceeded to knock all the 50 ml conicals on the floor, leaving myself with a nice homogeneous mixture of histopaque and blood. The extra setup and spin added an hour to the process. With everything I had planned for this afternoon I am still trying to finish it. I'm in another lab right now waiting to set up another experiment with one of my committee members.

One good thing though - last night I had an experiment finally work. Not much has worked in a long time. The bad part is that now kiwi has a lot of ideas based on what worked yesterday. In the span of a few hours he looked up literature, called another lab, and set-up a meeting with someone to collaborate with, without talking to me first. I need to make sure what he wants to do will even work. The right epitope may not be present on my cells. Not to mention we never optimized the T cell assay, I worked on it for over a year with another cell line and never got it to work, now he wants to try it again. I'm giving him until Friday and at our meeting I have to remind him that he says he can't fund me anymore, that the department will not pay for me indefinitely, and adding all these experiments isn't possible. Because what I did worked so well he wants me to use it as my model instead of the other cell I have - this means redoing every single experiment I have done up to this point. He's insane. He acts before he thinks. And he doesn't think very well.

Thank goodness it's Friday

What a day. First I slept in, I've had a hard time getting out of bed lately. I get to work and my boss asks me what do I know about the freezer. I ask him what he's talking about. I hadn't checked my email because I went directly to the hood room to process blood. Apparently, the top door of the -80 freezer was left open and stuff thawed out. Samples were lost, reagents, etc. He asked when I was in there last and I explained to him that I hadn't been in the freezer since last Friday (the date on my isopropanol container) and haven't even been in the room since Wednesday.

He proceed to say how apparently no one he's talked to was in there and nobody did it. He pretty much accused us of lying to him. Well, for one thing, the person who did it wouldn't have realized it or they would have closed the door! Second, he stood there an lied to me. FD told me that he already told the kiwi that he was in it in the morning. It feels more and more like high school, heck, elementary school in the place. If he's willing to lie about stupid little things then what about big things.

The autoclaving is piling up, that is supposed to be my job since the lab manager was let go but with the time course of my experiments it's hard to find time. LB needs to do it - he apparently has plenty of time since he hasn't been here since Wednesday. And if he plans on doing a necropsy every couple of weeks he needs to help.

It was one thing after another today. The one good thing was that my meeting with kiwi went well in the afternoon, amazingly. He was happy I had my new cell line (thanks to Geeka!). He even liked my ideas for experiments. To be honest though, he doesn't really know what to suggest because he doesn't really know very well what I'm doing.

Other than that, besides the freezer, my container of bleach managed to spill completely coating the inside of the hood, ran out of p1000 tips, ran out of GMSCF and had to stop to make it - it kind of topped off my week.

Thank goodness I'm actually going home this weekend. I don't remember when I was home last. There is a surprise birthday party for my sister and the weather is supposed to be great. I get to take the car and I'm going to relax and try not to think about work.

Probably the only bad thing out there is that the only Internet connection available is dial-up!

Peanut butter and jelly

Most of my friends here consider me slightly sheltered. I grew up in the countryside and never experienced a lot things until I moved to the city. For example, I had

• never ridden public transportation
• never had pizza delivery
• never had Indian food, Thai food, or sushi
• couldn't get cable at home
• never been to a strip club or adult store (those are stories unto themselves)

This is the first time I have lived somewhere where the closest gas station open late at night isn't 20 minutes away. Or fast food can be bought and still be hot when I get it home.

Today is the first day I have ever had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Not so much because I lived in the country but because I never cared for peanut butter. That was until I found the most wonderful freshly ground honey roasted peanut butter at Whole Foods. We don't have grocery stores like that back home. All that natural, organic food with no preservatives. I can eat that peanut butter plain. And the peanut butter and jelly sandwich was great! I can never go back to jarred peanut butter again.

The one thing nice about working late is that I can eat at my desk, which is next to my bench.

Faculty candidate

Now I find out that "they" want me to have lunch with incoming faculty candidates. I'm flattered but I'm wondering who the "we" is in the email. I know it's not my boss. He wouldn't recommend me for anything. And if it involves free food LB is always the one invited. I'm all for a free lunch and networking but now I have two more seminars I have to go to.

That also means I should probably learn what other people in this place work on. I've only been focusing on getting my work done and getting out of here. Since we moved to this new department I haven't paid any attention to anyone else. But is that so bad? My boss wants me gone and I want to be gone so why should I care what is going on outside of my lab.

Postdoc update

Okay, so now Mo and I have to meet with the applicant together. You'd think our boss would be smarter than that. All we do when we are together is bitch about this place. FD, Mo, and I had a talk today about how we were going to be honest with all the incoming applicants. We don't want anyone wasting any of their life by being in this void of a lab. I think we already scared away the first applicant. He would have been very good for the lab. He had a good personality and seemed to have the ambition and skills necessary to be a good researcher. Kiwi would only ruin his spirit. The three of us told him how it was - the favoritism, the lack of motivation, the differences in ideas in how science should be done, the lack of collaboration, etc. Perhaps we shouldn't have done that but we hate this place and would never want anyone subjected to this atmosphere without warning.

Mo said it is her mission to have all postdoc applicants turn him down. She needs to be careful because that could backfire, we will waste our entire summer meeting with candidates and going to pointless seminars. Personally, I could care in the least who he hires once I'm gone, I am going to sever all ties with this place. But while we are here we will try to warn people off. I wonder how long before Kiwi realizes that having postdoc candidates meet with us is a bad idea. Knowing him - he won't.

FD is going to do the same thing with the rotation student in our lab. Warn him that he wouldn't join this lab if he could go back and do it again.

Postdoc applicant

This happened yesterday but I was too busy to post. In my lab there are 4 ph.d. students (3 who do work, and one who doesn't), and one technician. Actually, there is also a rotation student but I don't know his name and I really don't care right now. The postdoc applicant is a woman from India. My boss (who I will refer to as the Kiwi, because he's from New Zealand but also because he shaves his head and it's fuzzy like the fruit - even though I realize people from New Zealand refer to the bird, not in his case) is having dinner with her the day she arrives. On the itinerary he also scheduled the other female student to have dinner with them - he did this before asking her. When kiwi saw her, he said he thought it would be good for her to be there because the postdoc applicant might feel more comfortable talking with her, or dealing with her, or something like that. He tripped over his words.

She was really offended and took it to mean that since she is a foreigner (she's from the Middle East), that she can communicate better with other foreigners, not Americans. I didn't take it that way, to me it didn't mean she couldn't relate to us, but that we couldn't communicate with her. Apparently, we Americans can't have an intellectual conversation with someone from another country. She kept calling him racist and sexist. I tend to agree with her on this one. He yet again is proving to be an idiot.

I'm speechless but I shouldn't be

So, our lab, together with the other labs on this floor, recently purchased a 14-color flow cytometer. It's crazy - I wish it had been around when I started my project way back when. There is so much I could have done, but since I have no intentions of learning a new system and a complicated machine from scratch I will stick with my old 4-color flow cytometer. Anyway, my lab mate just showed me a sheet of paper that our boss set on LB's desk. It is a nice table that lists two cytometers (we also have access to a 12-color), the fluorochromes, the emission spectra, and the exciting laser. There are also three more tables that list several dendritic cell and T cell relevant antigens, the function of the antigen, the fluorochrome available, and the exciting laser. In other words, LB doesn't have to think. The boss is now researching reagents and planning experiments for the student.

Picnic in the cold

It's hard to pass up free food when you are a graduate student. The Doctoral Student Organization had a picnic today. Food was pretty good. I ate way too many perogies. It was fun to see some people outside of school, even though we always end up talking about work at some point. Someone brought up how everyone seems to be suffering from funding issues nowadays, which I didn't even touch given how my boss tries to pull the "I don't have funding card" all the time. One student said it perfectly, it really means they just don't want you anymore because if they really wanted to keep you, they would find the money somehow. The only lousy thing was the weather. It's the middle of April and we were all wearing winter coats, hats, and gloves. It was a cold, rainy day. Just another day in Pittsburgh. It's even supposed to snow in the next couple days. How I wish for the 70s again.

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.

Let's get started

Well, after much hesitation and indecisiveness I have finally started a blog. The need to have an outlet to get my frustration out has grown to the point that I can't ignore it any longer. And I want to do it anonymously. I am a graduate student in the biological sciences nearing the end of my life-time career as a student. Last year my boss decided to up and move the entire lab to a new building - away from the rest of our department and away from my venting buddy. I need to be able to talk about "sciencey stuff" without having to explain everything and I don't like to bring frustrations home. However, that being said, I have no intentions of just complaining the whole time.

As for the title, I feel like I spend every waking hour (and non-waking) living in the world of science. Reading, doing experiments, defending what I'm doing to people who don't really care, etc., so I have a tendency to look at things critically. Yet so much goes on that doesn't require critical thinking, just some common sense, that's where the 'non' comes in. Also, too much ridiculousness happens not to share!

So bear with me because this blog will progress over time. I need to learn html and expand my Internet horizons. I've never done websites or web pages . . . but I am good at descriptive writing . . . at least most of the time.

Almost forgot, guess I could explain the name. I do a lot of confocal imaging and live-cell microscopy work. A friend of mine once referred to me as an image goddess. For lack of anything better I decided to use it. It also has a double meaning for me because I am a photography buff. I do a lot of digital photography so I'm always manipulating images.