Thursday, April 17, 2008

Reasons 4-6 my PI is making me crazy

#4: He comes into the lab (5 minutes after our grant discussion meeting was supposed to start) with Jackass Professor.  They’re kind of chatting with us, and Crazy Man says to other FGS and me, “I told him what you guys said!”  (We explained to Crazy Man months ago that Jackass Professor was not going to be on our committees because, well, he’s a jackass!)  How out of line is that???  I work in a very small subfield that I intend to stay in.  It’s entirely possible that Jackass Prof will be on a hiring committee or reviewing my grants or whatever somewhere down the line. 

#5: We’re resubmitting a manuscript originally written by and full of data generated by Former Tech Dude.  It was rejected when it was originally submitted maybe 8-10 years ago.  Crazy Man believes it was a mostly political issue at the time (and I believe he’s right).  So maybe a year ago, Crazy Man asked if I would rewrite some of it, insert new references and generally freshen it up so we could resubmit it.  I agreed, and am now a very internal author (which is fine for the amount of work I’ve done).  We got back the reviews, which were generally positive (except for one reviewer that clearly just didn’t like the model and made up crap alternative explanations) at the end of August.  I did a few quick experiments to address some comments and wrote the rebuttal letter.  All of which I sent to Crazy Man on December 7.  He got around to reading it yesterday.  That’s right, yesterday.

When I got into lab this morning, I had two emails from him.  The gist was that he wanted me to go ahead and resubmit the paper.  Except that he had been the one to originally upload all the stuff, and I don’t have his login.  Upon tell him this, I get, “Are you sure?  I uploaded it?  Why did I upload it?  Golden child and Post-doc friend uploaded their own papers.  Why did I do it? Golden child and Post-doc friend did their own.  Why did I do Former Tech dude’s? Golden child and Post-doc friend did theirs.”

Seriously.  He’s so hyper and that’s how he responds to things.  So I inspected all the figures and put all the figures, the revised manuscript and the rebuttal letter in a folder on the lab flash drive for him.  If it takes him more than 10 minutes to deal with it, then karma’s a bitch, isn’t it?

#6: Crazy Man has been giving other FGS helllllll!  And it’s making me crazy.  She’s planning this paper where she’s comparing the behavior of cells from 3 different transgenic strains.  One of these strains we recently acquired from another lab on campus.  However, these mice are around 8 months old.  Which is super old for the types of studies we do.  There’s also some evidence these mice are infected with something, which is obviously bad.

So other FGS setup breeders with the ones we have, and contacted other people that have this strain to see if she could get some younger mice.  She’s getting cells from these other mice next week.  And she can get them from two other labs, so it’s very unlikely that she won’t get the cells. 

Crazy Man had a fit when she told him this!  He couldn’t believe she was going to wait a whole week.  He absolutely freaked out on her, and it really ticked me off.  We’re talking about a week here!  She may seriously hurt him before she finishes up.  Seriously.

And that, boys and girls, is why I’m on margarita #3 before lab meeting starts.  

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