Big Day in the Lab

Well the boss had been gone the last two weeks (visiting researcher in Japan) and today he came back. Now I would like to remind my readers (all three of you) that we are, generally speaking, fairly productive. The problem with chemistry, science, and research in general, is that it's a lot of hurry up and wait. Emphasis on the wait. If you get too far ahead of yourself, you risk wasting time, energy, and resources (never good). So there's always a limit to how "productive" you can be in any given amount of time because you need to have some kind of results before you can move on.

So there we all are looking at our lab books and our crystals (or not, as the case may be) and trying to decide how best to make it sound like there's more than there really is. Or rather, how to show our efforts to their best advantage. Anyway. So we're all also kind of drifting around the various parts of the lab. No one wants to run into him first. But you can only be vaguely evasive for so long. The boss decides to set up individual meeting times with each of us, to discuss "where you're at" (aka what the hell you've been doing for two unsupervised weeks) and "what your next steps should be" (aka what you ideally should have already done). Guess who got to go today? Yep, yours truly.

Apparently, I'm on track. Do I now have enough to keep me busy for the next 2 years? Of course. But I managed to escape with what a grade school would call "Satisfactory". Score one for Jackie! The other side to this is that meeting with the boss is like meeting with a tidal wave. He just overflows with ideas of what you could do.