Friday frustration

I was actually going to be able to go home at a normal hour today, i.e. home by 6pm, but alas, the lab gnomes have foiled all my plans. The Central Blood Back screwed up again today. They didn't draw my buffy coat. They said if I really wanted one they could draw one this afternoon. I said it's not that I really want it, I really need it. I have recently discovered that the main reason my stuff hasn't been working for quite a while is that I need fresh dendritic cells. My frozen DCs just don't cut it. This is a wonderful discovery because now stuff is working. The downside is that now I have to process blood twice a week, which wouldn't be so bad except I have to do large experiments at the same time. I can't lose 2 days per week of experiments.

That being said, since I've been sick this week my energy has been consumed quickly so I was only going to process blood today and go home. Now the blood won't show up until around 4pm if I'm lucky. Which means I will be here until 9pm, at the earliest. I could have slept in today. But now I'm stuck here because it is pointless to take the bus home because I'd have to be back by 4pm.

To top it off, my boss apparently isn't here today. I could have left early with no hassle. One bright light, sort of, is that I don't have to come in this weekend. (Except to feed my cells but that doesn't count.) The laser is out on the microscope I use and won't be fixed until sometime next week. Downside - can't analyze my slides. Upside - don't have to come in!

Later in the day:

More frustration, so when I get back to lab from the CBI, I find out that a monkey is "being sacked as we speak" using my boss's words. It was supposed to go down next Friday. This is the second time this has happened and it's getting pretty old. I called my boss because he wanted to talk to FD or LB, neither of whom was in the lab. He was taken off guard because he didn't want to talk to me, but besides Mo I was the only other one here at the time. My boss told me that samples were coming from the facility and FD needed to talk to the vet tech to arrange a pickup here. He said if I see FD or LB to tell them whatever. I said flat out, "Well, LB doesn't come in when he isn't signed up for the hood. He's not signed up today so he probably won't be here. He hardly ever comes in on Fridays." My boss just kind of stuttered on the other end and changed the subject.

Then we went from frantically trying to get stuff done before the samples arrived to slowing down. They were putting the monkey down but snap freezing the samples so we weren't getting anything. Apparently, FD talked to the boss and told him he was tired and already had plans and wasn't going to process any tissue. And LB couldn't be found, once again he wasn't answering his phone. Surprise, surprise. The boss wanted FD to call LB and figure out what monkey is going to be put down for next week (it needs to be decided by Monday), and FD told the boss if he left a message on LB's phone then there was no reason for FD to do it. I guess the boss was pretty irritated. Good for him. It's not our problem that his golden child is never here and won't answer his phone. Why should we do his work when he's off probably smoking dope and being a bum?

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!

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.