The devil is in the details

Entirely NOT what I was going for...

A few hours ago, I was mentioning how I was just trying to kill a lot of time until 6 or 6:30 when it would be time to start my experiment. The time is now getting sufficiently filled, but not in a very fun way.

This morning our fearless leader (read: the boss) ran over to my desk to tell me about an MD honors thesis that he was reading. He described an experiment to me and wanted to talk about whether doing a similar experiment in my system was a good idea. I agreed that it was a good idea, and we decided that I would set it up. After he left, I looked back through my data, because I was pretty sure that I had done a similar experiment. I couldn't find one exactly like it, but I did find one 75% like it, and wondered why I hadn't done the "perfect" experiment in the first place. I spent quite a while this morning chasing down the answer.

A little later, the boss was back to tell me about the thesis again. This time he wanted to talk about how my research related to another set of literature. He decided that I ought to read said literature and get back to him on it. The he decided he would just give me the thesis to read once he was done examining the student this afternoon so that I could get all of the kid's references and read them (notwithstanding the fact that I've already read them and cited all of them in my preliminary qualifying exam proposal, when I discussed how that literature would relate to my proposed experiments.)

Then, even later, E. and I were sitting in the lunchroom having a snack, and in walks the scary Associate professor that I was excited to see absent from my lab meeting (see Monday). He wanted to talk about how my project is going, and then he got all up-in arms about what I SHOULD be doing. After a bit of conversation there in the lunchroom (during which E. abandoned me!), my unfavorite associate prof dragged me upstairs to his office, where he talked at me for an hour and printed out a paper and a bunch of abstracts that I ought to read. Then, he dragged me downstairs to the boss's office to talk about all of these experiments that I should be doing (thankfully, el boss man was not there-he was actually at the thesis exam, so we could not discuss with him) and THEN he dragged me to another room, where he got FOUR textbooks from a shelf and gave them to me to read as well. Oh, and could I learn this literature and come back with some papers and talk with him about it again.

And then the boss dropped the thesis on my desk.

BOOOOOO! I ended up cleaning up and organizing my desk, because there were too many papers on it at that point, but I should probably get around to reading soon. It is looking more and more like the end of this week/this weekend will strongly resemble last weekend (all lab, all the time.) Can you tell how excited I am about that one?

posted by Immunegirl @ 4:29 PM