First day
Jul 3rd 2006WallabyGeneral & nerd alert
“Um… can I help you?” “Well…. I’m [orange]. The new postdoc.”
Repeat half a dozen times. Even though I thought I’d met just about all the lab already
Semi-holiday notwithstanding, it was my first day of postdoc-hood. My new advisor was back from Ireland — where he was complaining that Guiness wound up being cheaper than Coke, so he even went to McDonald’s just to get a Coke that didn’t cost five times what it should’ve. I think I like that slightly better than my PhD advisor’s preference for fine restaurants, the better to find fine wine at. (Not that that was his only reasoning.)
I’d expected a nice easy day of filling out paperwork, picking benefits, getting my new lab keys, moving my old desk to my new desk, setting up my laptop, settling down to read some papers… As it turned out, the only bit of that that did happen was I made sure to pick up my new keys.
“Take the desk in the hall across from my office, that’s where your laser will be, once we get you started on the negative index project.” (*My* laser? Cool.) “See A. or O. about ordering a new computer for your desk.” (I get my own computer? new desktop instead of three-year-old laptop? Nice.) “You’ll probably want to keep track of the papers you read in some kind of Endnote thing — be sure to start with Pendry’s work.” (Yeah, I’d gotten that far, thanks.) “Why don’t you follow O. around this afternoon, she’s working on fluorescence upconversion and that’s where you’ll be starting also. Very easy experiment! I’ve even had high school students do it.” (So… I should’ve already read all those papers, then. Just not told Endnote about them.)
Well, it turned out that O. couldn’t be found, at first, so I wound up doing two-photon absorption with Y. instead. Who insisted, which I found alternately amusing and frustrating, on explaining the idea of a calibration curve to me. Yes, I mentioned several times that I’m an analytical chemist, and that I’ve been doing those for the last 10 years or so. It didn’t work the first time “I” tried calibrating with rhodamine solution, so she fixed it by … removing part of the calibration equation. Good thing I worked so hard on taking data for that.
And I still have no desk, since it turns out that the room he wants me to be in has three desks. One of which seems to be occupied, with a sign saying “through June 2006″, and two of which already feature computers, but no coffee mugs or other personal apparatus. So I’m slightly in limbo and mostly left in my old lab, with no place of my own to even check email. Sigh.
One Response to “First day”
Wallaby on 11 Aug 2006 at 5:00 pm #
Update about “no place of my own to even check email”:
That meant I didn’t have a regular computer “reserved” for me which could be used to check the account I’ve had for the past 7 years.
I still have that account. I will have that account, as far as I know, for the next year. Or more. That’s the one to use if you want me to see your message any time soon. I may or may not quickly see mail in other accounts, since (for the most part) I only check those when I’m expecting something, or clearing out spam.
Just to be more clear