Blinded by the light...
I’m fairly sure I’ve told this before, but in these cash strapped times, a pea roast will have to do.

As many of you know, I’m one of them scientist people. Up until recently, I had to do my own labwork and everything – I now have a PhD student to do all that for me, god help him. For a period of time, I was working as a researcher in the medical school of a large University in the South West of England. I spent a good part of my average day in a windowless room running very boring kinetic experiments using a big shiny fluorimeter. The windowless room had all manner of waterbaths and fans running, thus making it a fairly noisy place to work. It also had crap radio reception – pretty much all you could rely on was Radio 2.

And it was due to this confluence of circumstance, shored up by my own mindless stupidity that led to me being caught by my boss, sat at the fluorimeter, with my back to the door, playing said fluorimeter as if it were a piano, singing along to “I just called to say I love you...” at not inconsiderable volume, accompanied by the trademark Stevie Wonder side-to-side head sway.

I am living proof that qualifications are absolutely no indication of intelligence whatsoever. I’m thinking of having my name changed by deed poll to Dr Fuckwit.
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Fri 4 Jun 2010, 10:19, 4 replies)

Name's already taken...
www.tonykeenebirds.co.uk/dfp/dfp.html
( Colonel Boris "...a desperate Buzzfeed imitation...", Fri 4 Jun 2010, 10:41, closed)

If it's any consolation
it happens to all of us. 3 years on one project in the same lab drove me and my PhD student to split all of science into "a good thing" and "a bad thing" (we once tried to get "and the elevated levels of host cell protein in the purified Fab' fraction are most definitely a bad thing" into a paper, but failed)

I believe this tactic has now been adopted by the daily mail.
( the mighty badger Aphrodite, on a bar stool, by your side, Fri 4 Jun 2010, 11:40, closed)

Why is it..
the majority of labs are windowless!? I have just submitted my PhD, today (woo yay!), and had/have an office with no windows, a truly inspirational work environment ;)

Similar to you I also use a machine to do mind numbing work and have luckily not been caught pretending to be a robot (and making the whirr, click sounds) whilst loading samples :O
(Studentken is looking for motivation on, Fri 4 Jun 2010, 12:10, closed)

Our windowless lab* is the laser room, which is quite good for not getting caught being silly because if anyone's coming in, they first have to type a code into the keypad to temporarily override the safety systems. In other words, you get plenty of warning in the shape of a pretty loud series of beeps if someone's about to come in. You'd have to have the iPod cranked up pretty high not to hear it.

The other parts of our lab all have windows, incidentally.


* well, I say "our" even though I've all but quit my PhD, never mind...
(julius, Sat 5 Jun 2010, 13:35, closed)