The devil is in the details

Who stole my weekend?

Well, here it is, Sunday night, and I am supposed to be working on PowerPoint yet again. I'm meeting with the guys from the pharmaceutical company on Tuesday morning (see some previous posts for the backstory on this) and I have to give them this big presentation. The plan was to just use the presentation that I gave last week, updated to include the data that I generated over the past week. My boss said that he also really wanted me to "beef up" the presentation-ie add in a lot more data. I wasn't too concerned about that, because I had a bunch of data that was generated by someone who worked with me previously, so I figured I could just throw that into PP as well, and be golden. Oh, and I needed to make some aesthetic changes to the old slides.

In the end, I spent 8 hours analyzing data yesterday. I made lots of slides (or, I put lots of data onto slides which now have to be formatted) and lots of Excel files to graph and make slides of. The big time sink was the realization that this data generated by the other person was not analyzed correctly if it was analyzed at all (or else I didn't have the right files) so I had to go back and do it again before putting it into PP. I've still got a TON of work to do.

Today, I went into the lab again, but this time to do an experiment for my rotation student. The rest of my day has largely been consumed by doing laundry. Lucky me also received an email from the pharma people, asking me to email them the slides for the meeting. I have not yet replied, but I thought of some really nice things to say back. They have been emailing me daily for the past two or three weeks regarding picky details about this meeting. Maybe it's cultural differences, maybe it's a language issue, I don't know, but they never ask me for things, they order me to do things, and I hate it. I would love to tell them that the major hold-up on the project is that they email me and want me to give them presentations and have conference calls all the time, which seriously impedes my ability to do experiments.

After the thing on Tuesday, I am going to start reading all of the crap that my favorite associate professor has been putting on my desk (he is really excited, he comes to talk to me constantly lately and always has a stack of reading) in preparation for a meeting with him on Thursday. I still wish that people would leave me alone a little more. Whatever happened to me having fun weekends, especially when the last two weekends have enjoyed such beautiful weather. I am REALLY looking forward to next weekend (although I have no idea what I am doing, it just has to be more interesting than labwork) and I hope it will still be spring. I'm thinking that it will definitely be spring (I know that spring has started when I leave the house and wish for Claritin, like I did today) but I guess I am more hoping that it is sunny and warm.

And in closing...a quote from the current issue of Jane ... "Fooling around at least once a week provides the same increased happiness as a $30,000 raise in annual salary, and four booty calls per week are worth about $50,000. "

I'm just going to say damn, and leave this one otherwise without comment for fear of repeating an infamous incident following a comment on an unscientific study I wandered across in Cosmo. You may fill in your own snarky comments on said quote, of course remembering that I am a single girl living on a graduate student stipend....

posted by Immunegirl @ 7:46 PM