Playing nice

OK, there are some nice things about where I work now. People are nice (with a few exceptions). I like that (even though I'm not always very nice, but we'll get to that in a moment). It's not that people weren't nice at grad institution. Nobody was mean. We were just all perfunctory. I liked that too. I'm doing my job, I treat you with the respect and courtesy you deserve as my colleague and a human being, and we go about our day with minimal fuss.

Postdoc U is different. I was greeted in every office I visited my first day (parking services, payroll, department, benefits) with a sincere "Oh! Are you a new employee? Welcome to Postdoc U! We're so glad you're here!" Which sounds sort of creepy and cultish in retrospect but the sincerity sort of obscured that for me at the time. And the fact that people continue to be nice. Which is nice.

Except when they start policing the nice. See, I'm perfunctory rather than nice. I am courteous (no, really, I am!) and respectful so long as other people behave that way towards me. I also maintain a keen separation between my personal and private life while I'm at work, and I compartmentalize critique of my science v. critique of my person pretty well.

So it kind of blows me away when people get all offended and shit when someone (OK, me) points out a flaw in their science. This service is often, but not always, solicited. They ask for my help, and I point out where things are probably going wrong and how they can fix it. I'm good at that. This is what they purportedly wanted, and I delivered. So what's with getting all butt-hurt about it?

I also give pretty candid feedback (again, usually solicited). When someone says, "what if I try this instead (of doing what you suggested in your infinite wisdom AA)?" and I say, "If you do that, it will look like shit." I'm not being mean. I'm stating a fact. A fact that (if they heed it) will save them a lot of time and shitty-looking data. I think that saving them that trouble is nice. After all, I could encourage them to do it wrong and then snicker behind their backs when it turns out looking like shit. But that wouldn't be very nice.

Nonetheless, people here at Postdoc U tend to be a little taken aback when I open my mouth. I don't really get it. I'm pretty genuine - it's easy to know that I'm being sincere and I rarely express negative opinions of people aloud. The only time I've given anybody the what-for is when there's a lot of carrying on and slinging of racist, sexist, homophobic garbage in and around my workspace. I don't tolerate that crap, and I say so. I can't change anybody's mind about it, but they can keep a lid on it at work. I'm a fucking professional and I'm not in on the jokes. It's not nice. So the nice-policing goes both ways, I guess.

An Open Letter II

Dear Thing1,

It is very sweet of you to keep me company while I am lying in bed with a migraine. As you may have noticed, I am trying to get some work done on this proposal in the periods between raging pain. During these times, I would really appreciate it if you didn't try to park your ample butt on the keyboard or rub your drooling face all over the screen. It makes it hard to type. Not to mention the fact that the magnet on your collar which lets you use the cat flap could do bad things to my hard drive. When I'm not trying to type though, the purring and head-butts are quite charming. Just please don't head-butt my head.

Love,
AA

An Open Letter

Dear Migraines,

You can fuck right off. I've got this fellowship proposal, see, that's due in short order. It's written, but there is still a fuckton of stuff to do, like polish the verbiage, coordinate all the myriad documents contributed by various persons, triple check the page limits for each document, ghost write yet another document for yet another contributor, sort out the formatting issues in my preliminary data figures, and ride the grants officer until zie figures out why I could log into the funding website yesterday but today I cannot. None of this is very easy to do when I feel like my skull is coming apart at the seams. So cut it out OK?

-AA

*twitch*

It occurs to me that I have not had a vacation in 15 months. And the 15-month-ago vacation was tacked onto the beginning/end of a conference, which was lovely because I could not have afforded the ticket to confer-cation location otherwise, but it did mean that I spent a considerable proportion of the "vacation" finessing my talk. (Yes, I was nervous.) Since then, I wrote and defended my dissertation, started a new post-doc position immediately thereafter, continue to wrestle with some publications from grad school, and pulled together what I hope will be a successful fellowship application. I have been working my ass off.

I need a vacation. Really, really bad.

I got a fuckton of shit done last week - superhuman productivity. So, on Saturday I rewarded myself with a do-nothing day in which I sat around eating junk food and watching junk TV in my PJs. All day. And I didn't even feel guilty about it. God, it was good. Then on Sunday I made the epic error of checking my work email. (On a Sunday...why?) A message regarding my fellowship application was enough to send my planned weekend of relaxation into an anxiety-ridden tailspin. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. To ameliorate the anxiety (or rather to beat it into submission) I went to the weight room and lifted until I couldn't lift anymore. It helped, a little. I need to get a handle on this. I need to take a break. I need to start pinching pennies to put into a vacation fund so that I can plan one, have one to look forward to, and actually take one before I burn myself out over here.

Learn it, Love it, Use it

People, I cannot believe that I have only just now happened upon the Better Posters blog. It is nothing short of The Bestest Thing Evah!!

I am a huge huge stickler for good presentations. Content *and* style. It matters. Bad presentations make me itch. You don't like to give them and nobody else likes to see/listen to them.

There are soooo sooooo many absolutely TERRIBLE posters out there. There is no one way to do it right, but there are so many more ways to do it wrong and it seems that a lot of people presenting at conferences are making a valiant attempt to try all the wrong ones first before they move on to something actually intelligible. Please don't be one of them.

The next time you need to make a poster, spend a coupla hours perusing this blog first. You will be so glad that you did.

I make pretty fucking good posters already, but there's always room for improvement so this one's going on the blogroll.

What's Hot and What's Not

What's hot:

Uber-cheap on-campus parking!

What's not:

Still having to walk roughly a mile in a thunderstorm to get to car.



Exactly how not-hot this circumstance is can be calculated by the following equation:

Suckitude index = {[(D)^(P)]*(H)*(R)*(U)*(L)}/(S)

Wherein,

D = Distance from office to on-campus parking
P = rate of precipitation in cm/h
H = total hours since thunderstorm began
R = total campus area now underwater or acting as a river
U = likelihood that one has left umbrella in car (this value may be treated as a constant: 200%)
L = number of lightening-to-ground strikes in the last hour within a 5 miles radius of present location
S = likelihood that your post-doctoral (that's staff mofo's!) ass has been included on the "staff" email list informing you that all staff have permission to leave at 2pm today an accounta the flash flooding (this value may also be treated as a constant: 0.000001%)