Flies in the Coffee
When I make mistakes nowadays, I tell myself that it’s all right, that I’m too busy to think. I used to have time, I remind myself, but I recently have had a lot going on. I had more time to think back when I was a grad student. I’d think: What’s the logic of low-fat Twinkies? Why is water wet? And why does paper beat rock?
That one was a stumper. I’d sit in the Atrium Cafeteria with a cup of coffee and I’d think, Scissors cut paper; rock smashes scissors. Supposedly paper covers rock, but I didn’t see how this was a defeat unless rock was afraid of the dark. If anything, rock was a natural paperweight and wasn’t about to let paper get the best of it, all other things being equal. I did a lot of this type of musing. It put off going back to work.
When I started my molecular genetics fellowship at Case Western Reserve, I figured it would be pretty cool. I was incorrect — because of the flies, and because of the coffee.
The former were fruit flies — Drosophila melanogaster to those of you in the know. My job was to knock them out and push them around under a microscope with a tiny paintbrush. Four to five hundred flies lived in a bottle, twenty-four bottles made up a tray, and I ran through eighty trays. Of these million flies, I was supposed to find the ones with red eyes and crush them with a mortar and pestle to extract their DNA. The others were doomed to die in a jar of chemicals. Some escaped and lived among us, capering in the everpresent yeasty stank of their bottled brethren. Then they died in the corners and we stepped on them.
The coffee was a bigger problem. Because some groups were using tiny amounts of radioactive substances, no food was allowed in the labs. I put a coffee machine in the small eating area and would run to it every few minutes for a sip. Eventually, I just started leaving each morning for about an hour. I set a timer on the coffee machine so that I could escape in stealth. Each night, I’d fill it with grounds and water. Each morning, I’d find the grounds set aside and water in the decanter and I’d have to start from scratch.
“Is someone messing with the coffee machine?” I’d ask people. It was mine, after all. I had labeled it in large letters.
“Coffee?” they’d say. “Does this have anything to do with fruit flies?”
Soon, I began to disappear in the afternoons, too. It was the university’s fault. They said I could use my time however I liked. I liked using it to explore. For example, you can get from the parking garage behind the Rite-Aid on Euclid to the far corner of the old medical school on Adelbert without going outside. It’s over a mile and takes around twenty minutes. It took me months to discover this.
Meanwhile, the coffee problem intensified. I re-labeled the machine. I attached a large note to it which said not to take the grounds out and not to reset the timer. When this didn’t work (I could never catch the culprit; he or she was sneaky), I added a larger sign informing everyone that it was my machine and not a departmental one, and that if you were going to mess with it, the least you could do would be to put things back the way you found them.
Still, every day, the grounds were set aside. Every day, the decanter was filled with clear hot water. My frustration with the entire situation grew.
I started to take more breaks. I sneaked out whenever I could, to think. I thought about how “snuck” isn’t a word but “sneaked” is, and how “forte” is pronounced “fort” and not “fortay,” and about how if you said either of these two things correctly, people thought you were a moron.
Every day, hot water sat in my coffee machine. Flies buzzed around me. They smelled bad. And around the time my advisor called me into her office for a chat, I finally caught someone using my coffee machine. She was a short, timid Chinese woman.
“Have you been using this machine every morning?” I asked her.
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed these signs?”
“Yes.”
I shrugged.
“I need hot water for tea,” she explained.
“Use the microwave at the other end of the building,” I suggested.
“I’d have to walk all the way down there,” she said, gesturing at the fifty-yard distance. “This machine is right here.”
“But it’s mine,” I told her. “And I want my coffee ready when I get here. So use the microwave, okay? And don’t touch this, okay? My lab stinks and my job is pushing flies around. You can understand that, right? Stinky lab? Pushing flies? I need this thing, this one thing, to be there for me when I need it. Otherwise, I’m just going to have to let all of the flies go. ‘Be free! Be free!’ I’ll yell!”
She glared at me. I wondered if she would start spitting in my coffee.
My advisor called me in later. “You have to decide if scientific research is worth your attention,” she said. “You always wear your headphones and you seem not to be interested in the conversations around you.”
“Pretty much,” I agreed.
“I don’t think your head is in this,” she told me.
“In that belief, you would be correct,” I said.
“I’d hate to have to…” and here she paused, making a vague gesture. We both knew what it meant. It didn’t mean expulsion, because I was getting A’s and doing good work. It didn’t mean firing, because I wasn’t really an employee, though I did draw a stipend. It was more like rejection. Nobody wants an unenthusiastic grad student hanging around for five years. She was trying to be gentle. She thought I wanted to stay.
“I’m actually going to be quitting,” I told her.
I was gone a month later, having agreed to finish my project so as not to leave them hanging. I left my stinky fruit flies behind. I also left the coffee machine as my contribution to the lab.
“Just watch out for that Chinese woman,” I told them. “She’s a real bitch.”
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2 Comments on Flies in the Coffee
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What faith has to do with Martin Scorsese and his detachable penis : Johnny B. Truant on
Wed, 28th Oct 2009 9:57 pm
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You’re not normal : Johnny B. Truant on
Fri, 15th Jan 2010 2:17 pm
[...] something from which we’re supposed to take a lesson. i.e., if I hadn’t started having panic attacks while pursuing my genetics Ph.D., I would be festering in a lab somewhere right now. So, it was a good thing. And if I hadn’t [...]
[...] so I told him about how I used to work in a lab when I was moving toward getting a PhD, back before I decided I didn’t want a PhD. I’d [...]
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