The devil is in the details

I am an evil, evil person.

Updates on shopping, shopping and more shopping, my hellish day today and thoughts on interviewing a potential post-doc for the lab today will happen at some point (tomorrow?) but for now I thought I'd give you a laugh (or an opportunity to be thoroughly disgusted with me).

As you may know, I work in a lab that studies HIV vaccine development. We are a very big lab and kind of famous in the field (well, at least my boss is). The lab has been getting a lot of attention by the lay press lately after winning some prestigious grants.

With that kind of attention comes the following (a fax that we received at the end of June):



I've been told that we get faxes, letters and phone calls like this all the time, although this is the first one that those of us working in the lab have seen. I must admit (reason #1 that I am evil) that there is a copy posted near my desk to cheer me up on crappy days. I told a grad student friend in another lab about the fax and he said he was going to start faxing similar things to the lab saying that the problem could only be solved by a female graduate student in hopes that I could be sent on fun vacations.


This morning at lab meeting we had a guest speaker come in to talk about an upcoming symposium about AIDS orphans in Africa and his organization for helping AIDS orphans in rural Kenya. The talk was fine, I suppose, but could have been organized better. (I'm annoyed about it for somewhat unfair reasons, mostly because it caused some problems for me as the coordinator of the lab meeting. I suppose this might be another reason I am evil.) During the course of the talk, the speaker pointed out his clinic which is in western Kenya near the shores of Lake Victoria and he mentioned that in Kenya and in other countries bordering Lake Victoria, the prevalence of HIV is particularly high in the areas immediately surrounding the lake, for unknown reasons.


Suddenly, the only thought that filled my head was:
"THE SNAILS!! THE SNAILS!! IT'S ALL BECAUSE OF THE SNAILS!" (I even looked at the map as I was thinking this and noted that the Democratic Republic of the Congo DOES border Lake Victoria).

I am so bad. I had to work REALLY hard not to BURST out laughing hysterically in the middle of the very serious talk about Kenyan orphans (which would have been bad since I sit in the front row). Throughout the rest of his talk the snail/Lake Victoria thing kept popping into my head and I had to work hard to keep my composure.

By now I really should have earned myself a really nice spot in hell. Glad that we made those reservations so many years ago.

posted by Immunegirl @ 11:23 PM