must not strangle boss . . . .
Have been butting heads with my boss this week. I'm frustrated because my experiment just will not work. He's frustrated that it won't work, but keeps putting up barriers to make my work more difficult.
Yesterday: I spent all morning on the microscope and asked if he could take a look at my images that afternoon before I made a call to the company we got the protein from so I could be sure I had a reason to complain and it wasn't just that the cells had did what they were supposed to and I just couldn't see it. I go to lunch, run into SE and we go back upstairs to look at a few pics and discuss her costume to go see Episode III in. Boss comes in right after. I spent all of 20 minutes of my 12.5 hour workday yesterday doing this. SE asks if I want to make a mall run with her tonight, and I say call if you get a chance before you go but I might not be able to because I want to finish my scope work.
Why is this an issue? Because just before lunch, SR the undergrad came in to burn cds for Boss, and now she was going to be burning a cd off the computer the scope runs on. And I can't turn on the scope parts until I can turn off the computer. And Boss wanders off to 'do stuff' and doesn't finish telling SR how to burn the cds.
Realizing that SR is going to sit on the computer until he comes back (which didn't happen for almost an hour) I show SR how to do this, thinking it will be one cd, fine, done.
No. She burned 10 cds. TEN. And the second five were copies of the first five. This took almost 4 hours. Needless to say I certainly didn't get out with SE.
So I spent the next three hours or so puttering around and getting stuff ready and checking in to see if she was fricking done yet. (About 2 hours into this Boss goes home, blowing off completely my request that we talk about my cell images, because we can't because the computer is tied up burning cds (and the program we need will really slow that down even more)). He is only available at 9 in the morning (which is fine for him since he's leaving at 6:30 and lousy for me since I've got another 3 hours of work that I HAVE to do and it would have been only one hour if I had been informed that the computer was going to be taken over. Hold back Fist of Death. SE comes back, we chat a bit and he has plenty of time to chat with her about nothing (and me because at this point all I'm waiting for is to get back on the damn computer) but we can't look at the cells. Argh.
So today I arrive four minutes late for our appointment (there was an ambulance at the first bus stop and a lot of traffic, but considering my boss is usually 30-45 minutes late to all the appointments he makes with me, he can suck it up. He wasn't at work until 10 the night before (having gotten in at 9:30), he wasn't there on both Saturday and Sunday (for 8 hours total) for two weekends in a row, and he wasn't the one blowing me off. He can suck up four minutes. (I did apologise for being late. Of course he was actually on time this morning). Of course our meeting didn't start until 9:20 and not all of that was waiting for the computer to boot up.
So I ask him today, in light of SR's nearly four hours of burning cds, could he please give me a heads up about that if he's going to have a student come in to do something like that? I think this is reasonable.
His answer: He didn't realize there was that much data (Hello? Didn't you tell me how you imaged ten cells over several hours? I know the files were fricking huge, I just didn't know she was burning those files, much less making extra copies, until it was too late) and the best part, that I wasn't being assertive enough.
WTH?
He expects me to kick SR off the computer when he himself told her to go burn cds.
Excuse me? I didn't get the memo that I was supposed to be contradicting orders straight from him. Nor did I get the memo that says he has no fricking clue how big his data sets are.
The he got pissy because SE and I were talking about Star Wars.
While I can understand him getting pissy about it, I consider the fact that he had SR taking up the lab computer to burn cds for almost 4 hours (and him leaving her without instruction for God knows how long that would have been) to be a far greater waste of my time than the 20 minutes I spent talking to SE, which I left lunch early to do anyway. Funny how him answering email or writing up answer keys that were due the night before, or making his graders wait for hours for him (they wised up and all showed up 1-2 hours late today), or blowing off his discussion with me about MY WORK is okay, but me talking to a friend for 20 minutes is a problem.
Note this wouldn't have been a problem at all if he had told me SR was coming in. I would have put off lunch and finished before she got there and would not have been stuck waiting at all. Instead I got to sit around and go home 90 minutes later than I wanted and got nothing done I wanted to do at home. But my fricking work got done.
So I decide to be assertive. We have summer students coming next week (he is yet to tell me if (a) one of them will help me out and (b) what any of them are going to be doing but they are still coming.) I have given up all hope of getting one even though I have been asking for one since January. So it's clear I'm getting no help and he's pissed at me. So I go to the department computer lab to see if you can burn cds up there.
Lo and behold, the newer computers all have cdr drives. And they connect to the network. In fact, if DP (our computer guy who is also pissed at Boss blowing him off btw) puts our computer on the network, the little underlings can burn cds up there, and even if the can't, they can fricking copy them there and cut down double back ups to half the time on the lab computer. So I go and tell Boss.
His response: he doesn't want to put the computer on the network. And the underlings will have to transfer files (which goes pretty fast over the network, actually). So even though we will have three other students besides me generating data, and only one cd burner (on the same computer that runs the microscope) he wants to keep the current system of tying it up for hours.
Why the hell should I be assertive if I'll only get shot down? Answer me that.
So it looks like I'll spend this summer with no help, chasing him around and getting blown off, and working long hours and I still might have to leave with a fricking master's degree, which honestly, is looking better every day. At least then I can get a real job.
Yesterday: I spent all morning on the microscope and asked if he could take a look at my images that afternoon before I made a call to the company we got the protein from so I could be sure I had a reason to complain and it wasn't just that the cells had did what they were supposed to and I just couldn't see it. I go to lunch, run into SE and we go back upstairs to look at a few pics and discuss her costume to go see Episode III in. Boss comes in right after. I spent all of 20 minutes of my 12.5 hour workday yesterday doing this. SE asks if I want to make a mall run with her tonight, and I say call if you get a chance before you go but I might not be able to because I want to finish my scope work.
Why is this an issue? Because just before lunch, SR the undergrad came in to burn cds for Boss, and now she was going to be burning a cd off the computer the scope runs on. And I can't turn on the scope parts until I can turn off the computer. And Boss wanders off to 'do stuff' and doesn't finish telling SR how to burn the cds.
Realizing that SR is going to sit on the computer until he comes back (which didn't happen for almost an hour) I show SR how to do this, thinking it will be one cd, fine, done.
No. She burned 10 cds. TEN. And the second five were copies of the first five. This took almost 4 hours. Needless to say I certainly didn't get out with SE.
So I spent the next three hours or so puttering around and getting stuff ready and checking in to see if she was fricking done yet. (About 2 hours into this Boss goes home, blowing off completely my request that we talk about my cell images, because we can't because the computer is tied up burning cds (and the program we need will really slow that down even more)). He is only available at 9 in the morning (which is fine for him since he's leaving at 6:30 and lousy for me since I've got another 3 hours of work that I HAVE to do and it would have been only one hour if I had been informed that the computer was going to be taken over. Hold back Fist of Death. SE comes back, we chat a bit and he has plenty of time to chat with her about nothing (and me because at this point all I'm waiting for is to get back on the damn computer) but we can't look at the cells. Argh.
So today I arrive four minutes late for our appointment (there was an ambulance at the first bus stop and a lot of traffic, but considering my boss is usually 30-45 minutes late to all the appointments he makes with me, he can suck it up. He wasn't at work until 10 the night before (having gotten in at 9:30), he wasn't there on both Saturday and Sunday (for 8 hours total) for two weekends in a row, and he wasn't the one blowing me off. He can suck up four minutes. (I did apologise for being late. Of course he was actually on time this morning). Of course our meeting didn't start until 9:20 and not all of that was waiting for the computer to boot up.
So I ask him today, in light of SR's nearly four hours of burning cds, could he please give me a heads up about that if he's going to have a student come in to do something like that? I think this is reasonable.
His answer: He didn't realize there was that much data (Hello? Didn't you tell me how you imaged ten cells over several hours? I know the files were fricking huge, I just didn't know she was burning those files, much less making extra copies, until it was too late) and the best part, that I wasn't being assertive enough.
WTH?
He expects me to kick SR off the computer when he himself told her to go burn cds.
Excuse me? I didn't get the memo that I was supposed to be contradicting orders straight from him. Nor did I get the memo that says he has no fricking clue how big his data sets are.
The he got pissy because SE and I were talking about Star Wars.
While I can understand him getting pissy about it, I consider the fact that he had SR taking up the lab computer to burn cds for almost 4 hours (and him leaving her without instruction for God knows how long that would have been) to be a far greater waste of my time than the 20 minutes I spent talking to SE, which I left lunch early to do anyway. Funny how him answering email or writing up answer keys that were due the night before, or making his graders wait for hours for him (they wised up and all showed up 1-2 hours late today), or blowing off his discussion with me about MY WORK is okay, but me talking to a friend for 20 minutes is a problem.
Note this wouldn't have been a problem at all if he had told me SR was coming in. I would have put off lunch and finished before she got there and would not have been stuck waiting at all. Instead I got to sit around and go home 90 minutes later than I wanted and got nothing done I wanted to do at home. But my fricking work got done.
So I decide to be assertive. We have summer students coming next week (he is yet to tell me if (a) one of them will help me out and (b) what any of them are going to be doing but they are still coming.) I have given up all hope of getting one even though I have been asking for one since January. So it's clear I'm getting no help and he's pissed at me. So I go to the department computer lab to see if you can burn cds up there.
Lo and behold, the newer computers all have cdr drives. And they connect to the network. In fact, if DP (our computer guy who is also pissed at Boss blowing him off btw) puts our computer on the network, the little underlings can burn cds up there, and even if the can't, they can fricking copy them there and cut down double back ups to half the time on the lab computer. So I go and tell Boss.
His response: he doesn't want to put the computer on the network. And the underlings will have to transfer files (which goes pretty fast over the network, actually). So even though we will have three other students besides me generating data, and only one cd burner (on the same computer that runs the microscope) he wants to keep the current system of tying it up for hours.
Why the hell should I be assertive if I'll only get shot down? Answer me that.
So it looks like I'll spend this summer with no help, chasing him around and getting blown off, and working long hours and I still might have to leave with a fricking master's degree, which honestly, is looking better every day. At least then I can get a real job.