Research and Emotions

This has been an interesting week or two. We've been on the point of publishing some of our research for a number of months and just recently two lines of work showed really interesting results--as a result my boss decided to pull the trigger and get our results into print. So the past couple of weeks have had me chained to my laptop, carrying it with me everywhere I go, and endlessly making and remaking graphics in Prism (presentation graphics for research), Illustrator, and Photoshop. Gotta love it. My limited chance to link back to my "arty" days when I did some design work at dot com companies. Not as much creativity in science graphics but you take what you can, y'know?

Today, after my boss and I uploaded her article and my graphics onto the publisher's server, we had a little international incident here in the lab...

You see, we've been in this room at UNC for a bit over 4 months. The MD that was located here in this room previously had left for another university and stranded one post-doc. Let me tell you, that post-doc is very strange. I think the PI (principal investigator) might well have changed schools just to get away from his post-doc. The guy is nuts!

Anyway, the post-doc hasn't removed all his stuff from our lab yet even though he was supposed to have done that months ago---and so on occasion he trots in here and does some lab work. And if you talk to him he just goes nuts. It's like he's trying to pretend that we're not really here. (can you say insane?)

So, today he did "ignoring us" routine but one of our post-docs decided to get his attention by not ignoring him. Well, that made him twice as crazy as usual and it turned into an international event since he's from Vietnam and the 3 people he was eventually verbally fighting with in here are from Iran, Korea, and Nepal----it was crazy but kinda interesting to observe how the different cultures resulted in very different body language when stressed. (remember I'm in research---we tend to think that way)

As a result of the verbal abuse the crazy post-doc was giving out, our post-doc called my boss to report the incident. When my boss called back to the lab, the crazy post-doc lit into my boss on the phone. Attendings don't usually get treated that way--- that crazy post-doc nearly got his butt thrown in jail. Ha! So you see, science research can occasionally get exciting!!

I should have taped this verbal tussle for You-tube. The one guy was all red in the face and looked like he was going to bite one of the other folk. I wonder what will go on next week? We very rarely get excitement like this in research.

Comments

srp said…
It appears to be way, way past time for that post-doc to move right on out of there....

can anyone say... "anger management"?

I always did want to try out that Prism program... it would have come in handy for all the quality assurance we had to do each month.
7:13 PM
Evil Twin's Wife said…
Wow - at least it was an exciting day. And, yes, you should have taped it for us to see!!
8:39 PM
Utopia said…
Gosh! That sounds volatile! Wished you could've pulled out your cell phone.
10:00 PM
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