Ants under foot.

These days I have ants under my feet.

I'm really anxious to leave SmallUniversity as soon as possible because now I wake up and hate going into work. It wasn't always like this - I used to love going into work.

But since HippieHusband quit his job things at SmallUniversity are just plain awkward - not with all faculty members, just the ones whose balls are in TheGodfather's purse.

Today we had a lab meeting and Dr.Add'EmUp was acting really strange. Typically at lab meeting he's really excited and happy to talk about the work. Instead, today he worked really hard at not showing any emotion. It was so odd. The problem with his behaviour and the other faculty members is that it makes me want to look for work elsewhere. Yet, previously HippieHusband and I have discussed the possibility of staying for a full year here because they offered me a renewed contract. But with this atmosphere why would I stay even one month? (This is a rhetorical question - though I have thought seriously about this possibility.)

Because there is a grant due soon, Dr.Add'EmUp is really pushing to get a manuscript submitted by the end of June. I can appreciate the urgency, however, 3 months ago we were hit with some pretty nasty contamination. I spent 3 months tracking down the source of our contamination. Because of the nature of our work, contamination is bad news. The data collected after contamination cannot be trusted until the source and nature of contamination is eliminated. Once my undergrad and I had worked through all the experiments and figured out the source and type of our problem, we restarted the data collection. Last week. But it will take at least 2 more weeks to get all the data.

Herein lies the problem with working for a mathematician or a PI who is so far away from the bench that they don't have realistic expectations of progress. Although a good chunk of the paper is drafted (introduction and methods) and I'm setting up the analysis so that as my undergrad collects data I can automatically run it through the R scripts, submission to a journal by the end of June is a stretch.

For my career, it doesn't matter if the manuscript is submitted at the end of June or the end of summer because regardless I'll have two original research papers before the end of my second year of a postdoc. But it will seriously hamper DrAdd'EmUp's chance at getting that grant.

You know, before all this happened with HippieHusband, I would have worked late nights and weekends to try and push to get the manuscript done as soon as I could. Now I have no incentive to work so insanely hard for a supervisor who acts like that.

And maybe that makes me a bitter, angry, and petulant but then how would I be different from any other postdoc?

Perhaps, it's a rite of passage.