The devil is in the details

Update and funny story

Okay, so here's the deal on the company meeting...
I got in early this morning before the boss got in and ran into him as he was walking in the door. I asked if he had seen the email and he said that he had skimmed it at about midnight the night before (phew on not catching me leaving early) and that he would read it again and we would talk. When we talked about it, he made me feel a lot better, mostly because he is really good at spin control. We talked about what we would say to the company and how we would present the data. He didn't go for my idea of having the meeting on the 22nd or after, but I was sort of lulled into thinking that it was okay and that he would make sure all hell didn't break lose during the conference call. I checked with his secretary to find out when he was free next week, and emailed the times to the company (Wednesday or Friday being the times.)
Reply:
Oh, we're actually out of town next week. We won't actually be around to meet with you for a while. We will be in the US later this month-would it be okay if we just spent a day in Boston on April 1st?

I was SOO excited. I mean, I was resigned to doing lab meeting on the 21st, and I was almost calm and resigned to meeting next week and hiding behind the boss. I can SO do April 1st. I jumped on that really quick.

The rest of the day was frustrating as usual-too much work, but I at least got it done.

Then we had graduate student meeting at 3, where the grad students and the boss get together and talk about our recent data and implications of our projects. We were talking about trying to infect a monkey with this one special virus and how much of the virus we could risk using up vs. how much of virus was necessary to actually infect the monkey. In the end, we started talking about how much trauma had to be caused to a mucosal site to get transmission to occur. For those of you who are non-science types, we were talking about how much an intra-rectal injection tears tissue and whether the tearing was important. There were all of these comparisons to "the physiological setting" and we danced around the topic for a while, but no one ever came out and said the words "tearing involved in sex" or "rough sex" or "which types of sex are the roughest" which is what we were all thinking. I managed to act like a grownup through the whole thing, but it was tough. I couldn't look right or left, because I didn't want to catch anyone else's eye. Oh well, at least that is over and I only have ONE DAY left of work this week. Yay for the trip, and yay for leaving all of this yucky weather.

posted by Immunegirl @ 5:20 PM