Day 68 to 70

Day 68

Jan just walked through at one in the morning going "he-loo... He-looo... he-looo".  Then he sees me, and explains that he is worried that Jared (son #2) is not back (ignoring my suggestion to call him) and informs me that he is taking the trash out now.  He’s also drunk as fuck.

Without Rose to control him, he may be dangerous.

Day 69

I arrive home to find an argument in full swing between Jan and Rose. The subject: a meat grinder. Several months prior, the family had given Jan a new meat grinder for father's day. This was done for several reasons, one of which being that Jan feels that ground meat from the store contains cow eyeballs. Yeah, no shit. Jan had been feeding partially-frozen meat into the grinder. Too frozen, apparently; the meat was too much, and Jan ignored the smoking grinder's shrieks of protestation until the motor blew out. Faced with a tight budget and a meat grinder in need of repair, Rose was letting Jan have it. All the while, Jan is denying responsibility.

It was interesting to watch Jan, who obviously fucked up, squirm as his wife kicked him while he was down. Still, this was taking it too far. It's one thing to tease or say something you don't mean; it's quite another to scream at your husband "you screwed up the meat grinder, just like you screwed up everything else in your life!!!"

Say that to me, I'll have a divorce filing in your hand tomorrow. Jan, however, took it standing up. Well, technically standing up, but he soon went to bed for his nightly 8:30 PM depression nap.

Day 70

Our lab really sucks. The air conditioning doesn’t work, and while I like the smell of curry, the constant exposure to people’s lunches is taking its toll. The one phone line we share is crackly. The boss is too cheap to pay for a dedicated line, so we use voice-over IP on an internet connection shared by seven people. The oversharer tells me we used to pirate the wireless signal off the lab next door, but were caught. Then he tells me he slept with the incubator’s receptionist two months before I showed up.

Our corporate scientific database is a google document. All of us share a single-user account to Pubmed, the giant database of scientific papers, through a free subscription the boss somehow hustled.  

The boss sends out another email with a change in our corporate policy: We need to conserve how much liquid nitrogen we’re using – the biotech incubator charged us an extra $25 this month. I receive the message on our “corporate email” server, also known as the free email accounts Godaddy.com throws in with any domain name. Speaking of, the person in charge of designing the new “corporate website” is… me. Here’s how this happened:

Boss: Noah, you know how to design a website, correct?

   

Noah: I’ve run a bare-bones personal webpage.

Boss: Great, great. I’d like you to code the company website.

Noah: I am rampantly under-qualified to do this.

Boss: It’ll be a real value-add. I’ll send you a .png file of the corporate logo.

Noah: Do I get paid any extra for this?

Boss: When we hit our milestones we can talk about a deferred compensation package (walks away really fast).

Amazingly, we are making progress. The Ethiopian intern and I have made a few minor breakthroughs. Even more amazingly, I feel a little zing for science again. Scraping things together against long odds gives me a little pride, a little hope that our careers might not die in this little room.

Next Time: Jan questions Dr. Noah’s scientific credentials; storm clouds loom at the new job.