The devil is in the details

The Minion

I'm sure you all are enjoying Bob's minion adventures. Mine are much less exciting.

My minion is pretty great, actually. To get a place in our lab, my advisor made him promise to work here all four years of college as well as over the summers. He independantly got himself a fellowship for the summer as well. Anyway, I was frustrated with him most of the time during the semester because he was a freshman with no lab experience so I had to explain A LOT to him. He also wasn't there for very many hours a week, so he could never stay for a whole experiment and instead I had to plan around his schedule to try to be doing an interesting or educational step while he was around. It was not fun at all, basically it was just excessively time-consuming and felt like a baby-sitting job.

All that changed when he started full-time for the summer. I was a little worried before he came (I think I mentioned it in some previous post somewhere) because my advisor gets upset when he thinks someone doesn't have enough work to do and tends to be a little harsh on people with minions to make sure they are busy enough. ("I am paying him by the hour and I don't want my money to go towards time they are wasting!") I knew that I had plenty for the minion to do, but most of it involved experiments that have multiple long incubations where there isn't much to do. I was a little worried about how to impress upon him that he had to look busy during that time and not spend the whole two hours on his cell phone. I have lots and lots and lots going on right now and I definitely don't have time to spend babysitting him and assigning him things to do all the time...sometimes I just need to concentrate on what I am doing.

Well, in the end it was nothing to worry about. During the very first incubation on his very first day, he came over to my desk, took a textbook and started reading it and taking notes on it. He does that every day, although he has started bringing his laptop in and surfing a little during the day too, which really I can't say anything about. :) He also volunteers to help out other people in our area of the lab when they have little mundane tasks to do. I couldn't ask for anything more as far as independance goes. It's kind of nice that he looks things up or thinks about them instead of immediately asking me questions too.

It took a couple of weeks to teach him how to do the experiments I wanted him to work on for the summer, although after that he has been great. There are a few steps where he needs help or supervision still, but he knows to come get me when he gets to them and does all the rest on his own. Like I said before, I really couldn't ask for anything more from a kid with no lab experience the summer after his freshman year. He is a little hard to read which makes it kind of difficult to tell whether he is happy or stressed or bored, but we are getting a better rapport and he is opening up some. (I am a little worried that he is having some problems outside of lab, actually and I don't know whether I should do something or what to do, although I would totally want to help in any way that I could). I've been leaning a little towards giving him more free time rather than less, just because my recollection was that the transition to working all summer was tough for me and sometimes I would have given anything for 5 minues to think before I had to do my next task.

So in summary, he's great 99% of the time. I was a little frustrated with him last week (when I was obscenely busy) and he seemed to need more help than normal although I don't think I let it show that I was getting frustrated. He messed up a really important experiment on Friday such that it became unusable. I was pretty upset because it meant that I was going to have to come in over the weekend both to deal with the experiment and to finish all of the work I had planned to do myself on Friday that had been postponed by my helping him. I was majorly planning a calm weekend, but I could tell he felt really bad and wasn't making a big deal of it. Then my advisor found out and yelled at him which sucked. This week is going much better. I'm having him help me out with some other experiments that I need to do instead of continuing with his stuff for the week just so that he can get a little space from the frustrating stuff he has been working on.

After hearing about Bob's minion and the minions of my co-workers, I have decided that mine is the best in the whole world and that I wouldn't trade him for anything. :)

posted by Immunegirl @ 12:39 PM