The devil is in the details

I Can See Clearly Now, the presentation is over

And yes, I lived to tell about it. I worked on putting together the talk all day Monday. It ended up being 85 slides. I showed it to the boss in the early afternoon and he thought that it was basically fine, but requested a few changes. I showed it to him again at 4, after waiting for him to be free for a while. By that point, I was feeling pretty sick and just wanted to go home. All of a sudden, he decided that there were all sorts of problems with my data (which he had seen for how many months before this?) . I made some more changes and showed it to him again at 5, when he could again only talk about the problems with the data and the experiments to be done. I was sort of like "Yeah, I know, but I couldn't do a 10 day experiment in an hour. Sorry." Then he thought I was upset and started asking me how I was liking my experience in the lab, blah blah blah. I said yes, I liked it, but I wanted to yell about the stupidity of coming up with experiments at that point, and about how sick and tired I felt. We went through the whole thing again when I came back with changes at 6. He drove me home (and no, despite what E. may say, this has nothing to do with favoritism. It was raining HARD and he didn't want me any sicker when I had to give a talk the next day.) and we re-hashed the whole thing again. I went to sleep pretty much as soon as I went home and have felt considerably less sick since.

During the actual talk, the nice one was nice, the mean one was mean etc., etc., so it was all pretty normal. They asked a lot of questions and there was lots of discussion, but none of it was TOO rough. They also wanted to see some experiments again, which did not make me terribly happy, but it was okay. Everything is going to move ahead as it was before, which is good but also means that they will still bug me all the time (and they want to meet MORE often, and they want me to email them all sorts of crap like NOW.) The AWESOME news: they are having a conference at the company in late August/early September and they want me to come speak at it. In Copenhagen!! Isn't that so cool? I have already had about 17 people offer to go with me, to be my "projection assistant" or my "web coordinator" or my "valet" or my "restaurant-picker" or my "suitcase stowaway." I will have quite the entourage.

After all of this madness, the boss decided that I was getting a technician to work with me (the technician that I previously turned down because I thought I had too much going on to manage another person.) I figure that's pretty cool, especially since the rotation student's last day is Friday and because now the technician can do all of the experiments that everyone was proposing and that I was now excited about while I can do experiments that I actually think are interesting. I talked to her about the idea yesterday, and she is SO excited. It sort of freaks me out how excited she is. I guess she feels like a robot with her current work, so she is thrilled that she can be involved in a project where she will be more engaged and can see exactly how her experiments will fit in to the big picture on the days when she doesn't have study work to do. She actually ASKED me for a bunch of stuff to read and a copy of the presentation that I gave yesterday to refer to. Every time I talk to her, she cracks me up.

Okay, I ought to get back to reading for the Ass Prof meeting tomorrow (as well as grad student meeting at 3.) Any ideas for what I should do this weekend, when I will so gloriously not be in the lab. (Oh, and by the way, I am having some funny thoughts on the stupidity of scientists while I am reading, so those may show up a little later. This is too long.)

posted by Immunegirl @ 2:03 PM