#32: middleman & passer-by
Tensions were running high at work today. I walked into the lab this morning and overheard Natalie (the RA from the research group diagonally across mine) yelling at their undergrad intern. Something about Western blots and transfer buffers and ethanol and methanol. I’m not sure, I tried not to eavesdrop too much because I had my own experiments to run and I didn’t want to pry into what was really none of my business. I later found out from Sherney (their postdoc) that it had to do with a lack of common sense, not reading labels, neglecting to inform the staff when thing go wrong, and wasting resources with contaminated cultures and multiple failed Westerns. (For the record - I didn’t ask! She told me unprompted, on her own volition, as we were walking to the MRT after work.)
Having had 2 difficult FYP students attached to me from December to April, I can definitely sympathise. It seems that something about the Pharmacy program is really just determined to churn out students who aren’t used to exercising any form of critical thinking or common sense, and yet have enough false confidence to tend towards complacency so quickly and easily. According to Sayali (one of my colleagues), it’s mostly just the boys. According to Evlyn (another colleague), the girls have similar but slightly different problems. She told me that she once ran into a student who walked into the lab with a crop top, ripped jeans, and hair in a half-up do, and was extremely reluctant to properly tie her hair back and button her lab coat when she was caught.
I’ve caught myself thinking “Jeez, kids these days are really something different” before realising that I was a kid too not too long ago. I don’t think I was ever that difficult, but sometimes the lack of grace and understanding amongst the adults I work with does make me slightly uncomfortable. I’ve definitely been guilty of complaining to my colleagues about my FYP students making dumb mistakes, or being complacent, or arguing with me endlessly, and I’m not proud of participating in office gossip (lab gossip?) when Natalie and Evlyn overheard them giving me attitude (which, I won’t lie, was very validating). In my defence, I really did try extremely hard to be gentle with them when they made mistakes, no matter how big, small, or stupid they were. Sure, it’s frustrating to have to clean up the mess of an undergrad, or to constantly monitor their every move in case they accidentally do something stupid yet again, but when the lab is moving so quickly and the staff has so little time to handhold an undergrad with barely any lab experience, the expectation for failure not to happen seems slightly unreasonable. And I won’t lie, Natalie is kind of scary. It doesn’t help either that their PI is scary too, and is so much more demanding than most.
Later that morning, Mengmeng and Sayali (colleagues from my research group) got into an argument too. Mengmeng had turned on the water bath and left it empty to heat up to 60°C while she went to settle other matters, and Sayali, not knowing that Mengmeng needed it, turned it off because she was that it was empty. When Mengmeng came back to use it, she was furious that someone had turned it off and so she would have to wait again for the temperature to climb back up, while her time-based experiment had inevitably been messed up. Sayali refused to apologise, insisting that Mengmeng hadn’t told her she was using it, and so she assumed nobody needed it. Mengmeng later told me she felt a little guilty about reacting so emotionally, but didn’t want to apologise because she didn’t feel like she was at fault for not telling anyone that she needed the water bath. As I watched everything unfold, I felt guilty for not saying anything and not wanting to take a side. I’m the most junior staff member in my lab, and I hate confrontation. Sayali left to settle other matters, and as I sat at my bench, pipetting chloroform into my TRIzol-harvested samples, I listened to Mengmeng angrily complain about how Sayali had once turned off the thermocycler while Jeffery still had his samples inside. I can definitely understand the frustration because I would be too if it had happened to me, but accidents happen, and everyone makes dumb mistakes. But seeing how irritated Mengmeng was, I didn’t really want to be telling her that in that moment.
I’m trying not to let myself get caught up in the mindset of “I’m only here for a year then I’m gone, I don’t need to care about these matters”, because my colleagues are here for the long run until they finish their PhD. But it doesn’t feel right to try to mediate tensions that don’t directly involve me, or try to propose solutions when I’m the youngest staff member here. But what’s a good middle ground between middleman and passer-by?
For the most part, I’ve just kept my head down and made sure that I get my own work done to the best of my ability. I try to avoid participating in the toxicity, while not actively running away from it. Or maybe I am, I’m not sure. Running away seems to be a common theme in my life.
I don’t know where this journal entry was going. But I think that’s fine, maybe not every entry has to have some profound, revelatory conclusion.
