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.  

My new productivity plan

I’ve been really slacking off lately.  It’s been a combination of my attitude and laziness and the attitudes of other people in my lab.  So I have concocted a plan to get me back on the straight and narrow.

Step 1:

Start lab work BEFORE sitting down at computer.

My usual routine has been to come into lab and spend at least an hour or so sitting at my computer, drinking my tea and generally letting my brain warm up.  I am not at all a morning person, so I convince myself I need some time to get going.  That’s out.

Step 2:

Make a to do list for every day.

I’ve gotten pretty slack about this lately, and I need to do better.

Step 3:

Actually do things on said to do list.  Really.

Step 4:

Set goals.  Short term and long term. 

Step 5:

Make a plan for how to achieve goals with concrete milestones.

Step 6:

Take over the world!!!

Seriously, I think I need to be much more specific and concrete with the things I need to do.  I think deadlines, even if artificial, are key to me convincing myself to actually do something.

Over the weekend, I was thinking about Step 1, and I decided I needed to come up with a way to reward myself.  I was struggling to come up with an idea, but just now it hit me.  If I manage to start my lab work before sitting down at my desk every day for a week, I get a trip to Lush!!!  Maybe after a month of success I get a new pair of shoes.  I haven’t decided that yet.  So I’m trying really, really hard to have a good attitude about this, despite blowing up everything I have touched this morning.  

Sunday lab time

That's right...I talked myself into starting the crazy man's experiment today.  But really, I'm doing it because I want to (and because I'm an incurable people pleaser).  I just can't help myself.  

I'm finding that I really enjoy being in lab alone.  There's been a lot of negativity in our lab for a long time now (and for good reason).  I don't think I really realized how much that's been dragging me down, even when my experiments are going well.  

However, today's experiment is NOT going well.  Most of my work is done with primary mouse cells, and they are usually limiting in number, sometimes making it difficult to do some of the biochemistry stuff I'm working on.  So I'm trying the preliminary stuff for the mass spec craziness in a couple of transformed cell lines.  Therefore, I should have cells coming out my ears, especially relative to how many cells I can normally get.

NOT.  For some reason, I have lots and lots of death.  Which means that despite having two giant flasks of cells, I may not have enough to do what I wanted to do today.  That makes me a little sad.  It's looking like, despite my best intentions, crazy man is just going to have to wait.  And he can't blame me for it.  Hopefully I'll have enough cells to at least do something, but we'll see.

Reasons my PI is making me crazy #s 3-5

Crazy man emailed me at like 7:30 this morning wanting to know if I had done this experiment last week.  Somehow this week I was supposed to go from one phosphatase activity assay that looked promising (that's right, not glorious, promising) to mass specing these two different time points to look for modifications.  Might I just take this moment to say, yeah right?

So I had this promising phosphatase assay.  That needs to be repeated.  It's probably the most variable, touchy, spastic assay I've ever (and hopefully will ever) do.  I seriously think it changes based on the weather, who's in lab, whether or not I talk to my cells...  Yeah, one of those.  Not only that, I also needed to do a western to look at at least 3 different known modifications.  Which I haven't done yet.  Which will also need to be repeated.  And at least one of those antibodies is also touchy at best.  Of course, it's been months since I've done any westerns, so I may have lost my blotting mojo.  

So he's asking me if have prepped the samples to send to mass spec.  Would you believe that's a resounding no?  Why haven't I done it?  Mostly because I was pissed that he spent half the week on vacation without telling anybody.  I have the cells.  I have the reagents.  I had plenty of time early in the week.  But I didn't do it.  Is that spiteful?

However, I did do lots of other stuff, not that I really have much to show for it.  The question now becomes how do I tell him that I haven't done this experiment he's been dreaming about?  What do I tell him when he asks why I haven't done it?  Each repeat is basically one day worth of work.  I could conceivably have my mass spec sample ready by the end of the week.  If I wanted to.  And that's assuming my first prep is clean enough to actually yield anything.  Which is doubtful at best.  Grrrrr!!!

And to top it all off, he seems cranky that I didn't meet with him yesterday.  I would like to know when exactly I was supposed to do that.  He came in a little after 10.  By 10:30, he was talking to the golden child, which lasted at least 2 hours.  Then he ate lunch.  After that, he talked to post-doc dude for an hour.  After that he talked to other female grad student for an hour.  Then he went to a seminar.  Then there were refreshments.  Then he wanted to sit in the lab and be buddy buddy with us.  Then (at 5:30) he starts talking to female post-doc.  I had been in lab since 8:30.  So when the hell did he want me to talk to him???

Annnnnnd he's reviewing grants for a society that we are funded by.  He's making each of us read one of the grants and share our thoughts on it with the lab.  WTF???  Why?  He made us do this last grant cycle, and it was dumb then and it's still dumb now.  I'm sure in his crazy little head, there's a reason, but he hasn't decided to share that with us.  GRRRRRRR!!!

He is not supposed to be able to piss me off this much first thing on Saturday morning.  I could go into the lab and do at least one repeat of the stuff I need to do.  But I won't.  That would be letting him win.  He will not control my life like that.  I'll skim the grant at some point.  Hopefully it will suck as much as the one I read last time did.  That one was easy to pick apart.  I am going to go ahead with the plans I already made and do some hardcore spring cleaning.  So THERE!  You will not win, crazy man.  You will not!

Some good down time

Ahhhh...

It it SO good to be getting in some serious relaxation.  TM is at a regional meeting that's being hosted at our university, so I'm home all alooooone!  Well, it's me and Mr. Lou, but he's just sitting in the middle of the floor, looking at the ceiling when it thunders.

That's right, it's raining!  A nice solid thunderstorm, but not bad enough to be scary!  I LOVE storms.  I seriously should have been a meteorologist.  Seriously.

It's really nice for me to just be able to sit here by myself and let everything out.  Tonight, I'm just sitting here listening to my various country stations on Pandora and crying whenever the mood strikes.  Oh, that's something everyone should know about me.  I cry.  Over most anything.  I've gotten much better at controlling it though.  So now I occasionally need these times where I just let it out.  So if a song comes on that makes me want to cry, I do.  That makes me feel better because a song usually makes me think about something that makes me cry.  Lots of times it's stuff I don't think about much, but I'm still having some sort of issue with.  

Decompression is good.  Letting my mind wander is good.  Rain is good.  

Friday morning haha!

Over at Respectful Insolence, Orac had posted a rather amusing entry about an Olmsted article that was something along the lines of a friend of a friend of a friend talked to some HHS dude who said the knew mercury caused autism.  Big fat eyeroll on that.  Anyway, some of the comments were mocking this and were quite amusing, but this one from Jolene Jolene almost made me fall out of my chair:

my ex-sister-in-law's third cousin-twice removed lives right next door to this Dr. Jay guys' talent agent and is able to lip read totally fluently. She said that she say the agent said that Dr. Jay has accepted an offer from MTV to do a totally sick reality TV series. It's going to be called "Pimp My Baby's Vaccine Schedule." My sources are totally reliable, why would they make up something like this? The other news I heard was that MTV also made an offer to David Kirby for his own show, tentatively called, "Pimp My Community's Odds of Suffering an Epidemic of a Vaccine Preventable Disease Which Could Kill Many Babies and Children and Those with Compromised Immune Systems." 

BLECH!

I HATE the smell of microwave popcorn.  HATE!  ABHOR!  I absolutely cannot stand it.  It makes me feel sick just thinking about it.  And someone in the general vicinity of my lab has developed an obsession for popcorn in the late afternoon.  And I HATE it.  Not only has someone been cooking their popcorn right outside my lab, today they burned it.  Hu-frickin-rrah!  That just makes it 10000 times better.  Grrrrr.  Blech!  Makes me totally ready to go home and smell whatever gourmet dinner TM is cooking for me tonight.  (That's right boys and girls...he cooks!  I take care of all things pastry and dessert, but the boy cooks up a storm!  Grin!)