bottomfeeder

i’m tired of being at the lowest tier of every hierarchy, but it doesn’t matter. i’m there to stay for quite some time.

as i mentioned before, i was sort of nervous about my meeting with the head of the lab on friday morning. ok, i was pretty consumed by it and really wanted to get it over with. because that’s just the kind of person i am. anyway, i even prepared a little word document detailing my forays into glucagon signalling and my failures/successes. i nearly started making a powerpoint, but figured it would be overkill. plus, my figures didn’t look very nice when i tried to copy/paste them onto slides.

at 10 am, i was ready. the graduate student who is helping me (gsmg) didn’t roll in until 9:55, but did manage to make it in time. we strolled down to the PI’s office and –

PI: what are you two doing here?

me: uhh, you said you wanted to meet at 10 . . .

PI: did i? oh, wow, i must have been confused. i have a meeting. why don’t we meet after lunch, at 1:00?

me: ok!

i had to sort of rush my experiment, knowing that i would be tied up from 1 – 1:30 or so, but i managed to get done what i needed to, round up gsmg, and venture once again to the office door.

this time he was on the phone. it looked important.

i went back to my cells. i knew i had to leave at 2:20 at the latest, because i had a class to get to on the main campus. i also had some cell work that needed to be done at the last possible minute, since it was an 18-hr incubation and i did not relish the thought of arriving in lab saturday morning before 8.

so i waited. and then it was 2:00. i innoculated my cells with virus, and came back outside. there he was, the boss, in the flesh, actually inside of the lab —

PI: sarah, i’m so sorry, we’ll just have to meet sometime next week. i don’t want you to be late for class.

me: uhh, yeah! that’s fine! i’ll hopefully have more data by then anyway . . .

which is true. but still! i was ready for that meeting. i had thought about that meeting a great deal. i had scheduled it into my day planner and worked my experiments around it. he simply forgot.

the thing is, i really like the PI of the lab. he’s a likeable guy, warm and friendly, and i know he didn’t mean to brush me off. he just had other things to do and i’m just not a very large blip on his radar screen. in some ways, that’s fine – the fact that i could just disappear for a couple days and no one would notice/care actually works to my advantage, i suppose. maybe i just have to get used to this. maybe it’s a cultural difference – maybe ‘let’s meet tomorrow at 10’ means a different thing to me than to others. but part of me was a little bit hurt by the brush-off.

anyway.

some other random things:

** kaplan emailed me. the head of the chapel hill center wrote that she was ‘impressed with me’ and promised to ‘forward the information on to the durham center recommending me for a job.’ the head of the durham center is off (and apparently out of the country) until november 1st, though, so i’m not going to hear anything formal until then, but it sounds like if there is an opening, i get a job! at least i think that’s what it means. i guess we’ll see in a couple of weeks . . .

** i saw david sedaris perform last night. he was funny. he’s a likeable character. but he’s definitely neurotic and weird. you know how he writes about his neurotic tendencies, and you think he’s just trying to play them up for comedic effect? now i realize he’s just being honest. but it was a good show.