Beyond the Drawbridge

Just because you’re DVC Research doesn’t give you the right to nick my chair EVERY TIME YOU TALK TO YOUR FUCKING USELESS POSTDOC.

This person is not particularly liked around the place. This

I just used [the gel-doc system] and the person before me had left a puddle of liquid on the glass base.  Judging from the photo taken I presume this liquid would have been contaminated with ethidium bromide.

This sort of mess left on common-use equipment shows a certain amount of laziness and disregard for colleagues, not to mention the potential damage to the instrument.

So whoever left the mess, get your act together and clean up after yourself.  If the box of tissues is empty, as it was when I used the instrument, go and get another box – like I had to.

None of this is all that difficult.

Bleh. Please.

Brunhilde is agog at some of the language in the latest HR newsletter:

SydneyRecruitment manages the end-to-end recruitment of staff and the on-boarding of new staff.

On-boarding sounds like the sort of thing young, fit babes might get up to at Bondi.

I’m afraid I never read those emails anymore. They’re full of such stuff. I retrieved this month’s copy from the trash and chose a few lines at random:

…cancellation of any sponsorship rights going forward.

SydneyPeople is divided into HR teams that work together to service all your HR needs

advice and guidance to [clients] on strategic and operational human resources issues impacting the University’s performance.

…proactive development of internal talent…

…ensures the principles of workforce diversity and EEO are embraced

..ensuring the University’s overall remuneration strategy meets the domestic and global
competition for talent.

I thought ‘meeting competition’ was a great concept, but I’m worried that I’ve been re-aligned:

With an effective date of 1 August 2008 the HR Service Centre will have re-aligned the support of the University’s groups/schools/units to different HRSC Team Members.

Do you think that might impact my performance to such an extent that I might need to proactively embrace internal talent development and be serviced by HR?

This is what you get when stuff is written by people from the Centre for the Mind. Seriously.

Normally, I try to restrain myself from expressing petty complaints about the behaviour of my colleagues, knowing as I well know that my own actions are most certainly not beyond reproach.  However, I find myself very much in the mood for a rant, having discovered yesterday – at a somewhat inopportune moment – that someone has stolen the cart for the autoclave, a cart so specialized in its design, that it can really serve no other purpose than assisting me in the removal of 8 litres of superheated liquid from said machine.  The occasion forced me to ponder the profoundly philosophical query, “What the Fuck?”

And since I am in a mood to relieve myself of annoyances by the time tested method of griping, and knowing as I do of the Black Knight’s affection for imprecise communication, I thought I might give vent to a peeve peculiar to my department.  The Department of Pharmacology is split between two buildings.  In the Blackburn Building, it occupies portions of the 2^nd (which is inexplicably located below ground level) and 3^rd floors.  In the adjacent Bosch Building, it occupies the 2^nd floor (which is indeed the second level of the building).  I reside on the 2^nd floor of the Blackburn Building, which by the by has an additional four levels above me containing all manner of useful resources (excluding, at present, the autoclave). 

For reasons unknown and beyond my imagining, everyone in the Blackburn Building refers to the portions of the department located in the Bosch Building as “upstairs”, rather than “next door”.   Thus when someone asks, “Are you going upstairs to autoclave your media?” and I reply in the affirmative, there has not been any reliable exchange of information.  This phenomenon has resulted in countless confused conversations regarding the locations of various items and personnel.

Granted, the 2^nd  level of the Bosch Building is technically located on a higher physical plane than the 2^nd level of the Blackburn Building, but calling it “upstairs” seems like a shockingly ambiguous description of its location.  I cannot help but imagine that the 3^rd floor occupants of the Blackburn Building must feel marginalized in some small way by this tradition.  No one has been able to offer any consolation by way of an explanation, resorting instead to the frequently echoed excuse “that is just the way it has always been done” – a phrase so freely tossed about that it could fuel an entire rant of its own.

Fortunately, my hostile emotions are now dissipated, thus I shall retreat to my 2^nd floor dungeon to perform some outdated task while I wait for the autoclave to cool down.

One of our fearless administrators (and actually, she’s one of the good guys) is trying to reduce costs and simultaneously yet more importantly actually get stocks of a certain consumable into the building.

The consumable in question? Lab notebooks.

We’ve been using these rather nice notebooks that have places for signatures, page numbers and whatnot: they also come with the University crest. But the University has not been able to supply them for nearly six months. So GoodAdmin went to the supplier and found that she could get larger (as in more pages) notebooks without the crest (but otherwise identical) reasonably quickly — and more cheaply. She asked the Cage if that’s what we wanted her to do.

Yay! We cheer.

And then, MediaWhoreProfWhoGivesStudentsUselessProjects says

To tell you the truth, I think we should be spending a bit more and branding the lab books with MMB and USyd logos (other departments do) – to give the students something to be proud of, that also informs them a bit about the value of IP (intellectual property) etc etc. Am I the only one who thinks like this?

It’s taking a great deal of willpower to not write back

Yes

or even

Only if your grant pays the extra for all of us

(Pippadog: Does she even have any grants? Or is it all thirty pieces of silver from the Meeja?)

It’s this kind of lunacy that made leaving industry less painful. I can just imagine this argument from my 8 year old: Sociology brand their lab books, why can’t we?

Note added in proof: Just don’t get me started on why she needs all those things in her .sig … on an internal mailing list.

I’ve wibbled about the Honours talks, and the reaction to them (also here, for those of you who don’t know about it). In that post I mention something darkly.

Last year there were a couple of proposal talks where I distinctly remember thinking something like ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’. More precisely — what was the supervisor thinking? My reservations were borne out by the end of Honours talks, in which the killing (although the student, under instruction from the supervisor, probably said they were ‘sacrificed’. As if that makes it better. Or true) of several dozens of pigs and mice were described to zero scientific benefit. This year, although I attended possibly less than half of all the talks (if only because I am fed to the back teeth with LIM domains), one talk sticks out as being particularly whisky tango foxtrot.

The student actually seemed a fairly smart guy, which makes the project even more of a travesty.

So this guy’s project is to take stool — no, let’s say it, shit — samples, shake (some of) them in broth to grow the facultative aerobes, and then streak them on arbitrary antibiotics to see to what they’re resistant. And then repeat this at some undefined timepoint (from the same shitters) to see if it (i.e. the antibiotic resistance) changes. In this way he will see if the population of the tiny proportion of shit that is aerobic changes.

Never mind that this is a stupid assay. Never mind that he’s only going to start with 4 shitters and if any of them has to take antibiotics in the time period their shit is unusable, never mind that the effect of a stonkingly good curry is going to fuck this up good and proper (thanks, m’good friend pippadog) and the hundred and one scientific reasons that this sucks; what kind of introduction to the doing of science is this?

I have my own theories. I think the supervisor in question wants to do this (because she’s a fruitcase) and won’t — or can’t — give it to any one more senior in the lab (because they would tell her to fuck right off). I think she’s stuck in the 18th century and is trying to turn shit into gold. I think a lot of things, but I’m getting incoherent, and frankly, I can understand and would happily defend why points one and two came up.

It is a crappy project, and it stinks, and I am really really sorry anyone has to put up with this.

It is my pleasure, most mornings, to take coffee with the Black Queen in the common room. We like to get there early and steal the biscuits. On occasion, work intrudes and we get there a little late, to find that all the nice ones are gone and we’re left with scabby teddy bears or dried arrowroot. All the good seats have gone by this time, and we are forced to sit with — by definition, almost — unpopular people.

This happened a couple of weeks ago. One table only had space, and two of the chairs were taken. One of them was occupied by PR, who for reasons unknown seems to believe that he and I are the only two people in the department who use Macs. I have come to this conclusion because every time he sees me at coffee he asks me a Mac-related question. Every time.

This in itself would not be so bad, except they are quite — how shall I put it? — singular questions. In other words, it is quite possible that no one else has these problems, or more to the point, no one else in the world would have initiated the sequence of events that inevitably led to this particular problem. I tend to begin by saying “Well, I don’t do it quite like that” or similar, but he never seems to get the hint.

On this particular occasion the script started to unfold as usual, and BQ started talking to someone on my other side. Can’t blame her, but my heart sank when I realized I was going to have to spend my coffee break listening to this drivel. But hope flared in my heart when the incomparable MS walked into the common room, and headed towards our table. Surely, I thought, she’ll have something interesting to say, and deliver me from this?

But no. MS, bless her, obviously thought our conversation was too important to interrupt, and sat down out of hope’s reach.

Twenty minutes later, when MS rose to leave and I was about to gnaw my own leg off, I saw my chance, made an excuse and caught up with her at the stairwell.

“M,” I said, “next time you see PR talking at me, please, please please please, rescue me.”