Thursday, December 15, 2005

Ten Things

Ten things that are not supposed to happen but always do by some arbit extension of Murphy's law.

1) It is when you are not wearing your specs that a cockroach will dart across your room. What follows is a hunt for the specs followed by hunt for cockroach.

2) It is the most important experiment for the paper that will require the most troubleshooting.

3) You will spend three hours trying to fix the microscope computer so that it will give you beautiful images but it is when you are 5 minutes into playing Mah-jong solitaire that your boss will walk in and ask "So what are you upto?"

4)It is the night, when you have to give a presentation at 9 a.m. the next day and therefore need a good nights sleep, that your next door neighbour will choose to play tymphanic membrane splitting rock music at the highest volume possible.

7) When your boss has a discussion with you he will invariably ask you about the experiment which you have not done.

8) By corollary, he will not ask you about the experiments which you have done and which have worked.

9) It is the reference ,that you need the most, that will be in a journal which the institute library does not subscribe to.

7) You may attend all (ummm...well....MOST) of the talks in the department but it is the talk that you do not attend which will be attended by the Head of the Department and you absence will be noted.

8)It is the one talk that you will not attend in which the molecule that you work on will be mentioned and hotly discssed. To add insult to injury, there will be public annoucements of "Where is samudrika?Where is samudrika?"

9) It is when you are dressed like something the cat dragged in that your boss will insist that you show your data and discuss things with the Great Scientist from Abroad(GSAB) whose talk you have not attended by the way. (see 7 and 8 above)

10) It is when you have composed your most creative, most witty post (which you think will receive the most comments) that it will be gobbled up by Blogger and sent to the Great Recycle Bin in the Sky.


More details on the GSAB later.

4 comments:

kate said...

The most important question: Was the GSAB cute? :D


another most-unfortunate -yet-common occurence:
You're always the one to open the lab, but the one day you're late and walk into the canteen at eleven twenty, you spot your entire lab having a discussion over tea.

samudrika said...

No, Kate he wasn't! :(

kray said...

It's a nice thing tho, when u find a list of rather vague ramifications of Murphy's law stuck on u'r boss's workstation :D.

But then again, I'm not doing PhD...

post-doc said...

It's always nice when visitors are cute or have good accents. I'm sorry to hear things didn't go well, but I'm sure you'll bounce back.

Thanks for the comment re: publication revisions! I'm going to do some research and see if there are a lot of people (who are clearly not me) who get work accepted as is.

And (last thing), I hope things work out with your travel to the US! I've struggled getting money to get out of the states for interviews and conferences, but always got where I wanted to go. So I wish you similar luck.