I am not quite so sad any more. I am pretty blue but I can at least “smile like I mean it”, as the Killers would say. I have a plan to try and be more active outside work, to help me forget about what goes on at work. Ok. That is a lie. I have a plan to make a plan. Soon.
There is not much I can do about what happens in the lab though, except prostrate myself in front of the Biology Goddess.
The Biology Goddess is an irrational bitch to work for. When she is in a bad mood, you know all about it. Your experiments won’t work. Things turn out to be turnips, say, instead of fruit flies. And when you start it all again, you will get completely different results to the time before.
So what you have to do is, you have to appease the Biology Bitch. You have to make a sacrifice, or wear a special symbol of respect. Biology may as well be voodoo or witchcraft for the way most scientists behave. They will have their lucky charm; their favourite pippette, their special red jocks, their monkey mascot, whatever it is that they had or wore or did when something went right. They will try to replicate that glorious day each time they do the experiment, or surely it is doomed to fail? The Goddess must be appeased.
You will see many a scientist, lovingly fondling their tubes while whispering powerful incantations over their DNA potions.
I happen to know a good spell that cannot be repeated here for it is like gold. But the abridged version goes something like this:
“you little fuckers, you had better do what you are supposed to, or I am going to spit on you, pee on you, stomp on you and feed you to the incinerator. P.s. iloveyouiloveyouiloveyou please work."
My supervisor said to me the other day that I have the touch or the knack for a certain technique. Erm, no. Logically there is no magic touch. If you follow the protocol it should work. Logically. It didn’t work once because some of our sequences were faulty. The next time it worked because we fixed them. But logic does not apply here. We put it down to magic and mysticism in the end.
And of course what I did not tell my supervisor was that I was wearing my uber special lucky left purple stripy sock at the time, folded exactly once, two fingers above the ankle, and that is why my experiment worked that one time. Now I am going to have to wear that bloody sock every day. I wonder if washing it will remove some of its good luck potency?
You may think I am joking, but from what I have seen, for a bunch of people who supposedly lean from agnosticism towards severe atheism, Biologists are all superstitious voodoo priests.
If I had known this before, I doubt I would have taken up Biology after school. Who would, unless you enjoy constant failure, a mad logic that no one has quite yet deciphered, and a bitchy goddess who is impossible to appease?
And quite frankly if some guidance counsellor had told me that at some point in my career I would need to delicately massage some fragile tubes in order to ease a “blocked orifice flow”, well I would have thought twice. But I don't know. Maybe I am just picky.
