I am a bad person

I learned how to do awful things to mice today.
I think I am going to a hell full of hungry, mean mice.

And I think I will meet a lot of my lab acquaintances there.

Just had the weirdest phone conversation

Probably a new fraud scheme.

Somebody from the area code of my old lab called. I normally don't pick up the phone unless I recognize the number. But I thought this could be K, Boywin, X or one of the old friends......

"Hello"

"Hi XXX, this is Dave."

"Uh... which Dave?" (I suppose most women have friends named Dave. Unfortunately for him, the only Dave I know is the grants manager here.)

"You don't remember me? It's Dave!"

"Uh, no." (I suppose most polite people would pretend they remembered and get on with the conversation while racking their brains about who Dave is. I am simply not very civilized in that aspect.)

"But you used to do nails, didn't you?"

"Huh? Nails?" (Are you talking about the kind that we pound into walls to hang pictures?)

"I mean, don't you used to get manicures and pedicures?"

"Uh, no." (Again, most women would have done these things at least a couple of times in their lives, but I am a stingy, germophobic slob.)

"Then I must have gotten the wrong number. But wait, you sound cute, are you single?"

"Uh, no, I am not single," (considered for 2 seconds whether I should inform him of the baby that is about to burst out of my belly) "Bye."

"Oh, I'm sorry I must have gotten the wrong number."

"Uh, Bye."

In retrospect there's scam written all over this. But I can't figure out how he could get any money off me this way.

This is the moment I say

Oh, fuck.

All of my microarray data got deleted from the server for no reason without warning.

It takes me about 20-40 hrs to up-load all that data again,
And there's no guarantee they won't get deleted all over again.

I feel like I am turning into the French kid in South Park movie.

My Fedex Story

My lab is getting poorer, so I need to get funded to keep my job in the long run. The way to get funded is to write fellowship applications. So I've been writing applications after applications since last summer. Generally it is not easy to get awarded with a fellowship, the success percentage is around 2-8% of the ones I applied for.

When you apply for a fellowship, it's a bit like a combo of writing a term paper and applying for graduate school. You need to get a number of reference letters from famous scientists, and you need to write about what you want to do in the next few years and for the rest of your life. The reference letter part is annoying, because most of the famous scientists are also very busy people, and they tend to wait till the very last minute to give you reference letters.

The writing part is also tough. First you probably want to have as much data as possible, so you would be doing experiments till you really don't have any more time. And then you would like to have your boss read the stuff you wrote before you send it out. Again, most of the time they wait till the last moment to do that.

The result of all these last minute habits is that most people do not send out their applications until the very very last moment.

And this is what happened last week.

One of the deadline was April 1. The application needs to get there by 5PM.
I was not very bad this time, and I actually got the application ready to go before the Fedex people came to our building to pick up the shipments. On top of that, this time I remembered to keep my tracking number.

So I dropped the package off, went home, and found out online that my package was picked up at 8PM, 3/31. The estimate delivery time was 10:30AM on April 1.

I was quite relieved and slept well that night.

On April 1 I had a lot of benchwork, so by the time I could track my package it was almost 5PM. I thought, well, it must have arrived already, but I'll check anyway just to have peace of mind.

And Fedex Tracker told me the package was still in Tennessee at 4:35PM.

It needed to be at Atlanta, Georgia at 5PM. There is no way my application will make the deadline!

I blinked.

I rubbed my eyes.

I reloaded the page and blinked again.

My heart rate went up to probably 150/min, my hands were shaking.

I called Fedex.

The Fedex lady I talked to was actually really nice. I was, on the other hand, not very polite at all. My bad.

She told me that there was a major service interruption, due to a thunderstorm in Tennessee. 65 flights were grounded, so Fedex cannot be responsible for the delay in package deliveries. She said it was an act of God.

After arguing with her for another few minutes, it began to dawn on me how useless my struggle against this act of God is. I thanked her, she apologized, I said it wasn't her fault, and I hung up.

And I started crying in despair.

Despair is never good for anybody. This time it drove my husband into saying the following sentence:
"Maybe it's just an April Fool's joke from Fedex."

And I hit him on the head, hard.

And then I worried for ten seconds that I killed off some of the important neurons in there.

And I started crying again.

The problem with crying, is that you can only do it for so long. It is really quite exhausting physically, and all the time you are doing it you know this activity does not help you achieve anything aside from looking stupid and making people around you say stupid things.

So I stopped, and wrote a groveling email to the funding agency, asking them to accept my application because I have no control over natural disasters.

Couldn't sleep that night.

The following day, the nice people at the funding agency said they extended the deadline by one day because of the storm. And I started tracking on Fedex site every ten minutes. My package got to Atlanta that morning, but was never delivered.

By now I have run out of energy to freak out again. Like the french kid in the South Park movie, I simply muttered, "God hates me".

After three more phone calls to Fedex and another sleepless night, I finally got to speak to someone who knew what was going on. So what happened was, the funding agency's mail room was too small. On the application deadline they got too many packages, so Fedex could not deliver to them any more. And because of the vast number of packages, neither the funding agency nor Fedex could scan through all the packages that were there.

The only thing they could tell me is,
"your package is most likely somewhere around, but we can't confirm it till three weeks from now."

I sighed.

I was not looking forward to the next fellowship, which is due on April 8.

I am, however, thankful that the whole AA aircraft-grounding fiasco did not happend till April 9.

這個女人真是令人作嘔

這是在東森看到的

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和周美青哪裡相似？　蕭薔：我一雙球鞋穿8年 2008/04/02 23:29
記者韓佩穎、王鴻年／台北報導

好萊塢的片商有意籌拍【台灣總統的故事】，準第一夫人周美青的角色，屬意由蕭薔飾演，2日晚間蕭薔擔任愛心大使亮相，談到這個話題，蕭薔說，她有雙球鞋一穿就是8年，和周美青一樣，她也是很節儉的！
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一雙球鞋穿八年,
請問妳蕭薔總共穿了幾個鐘頭,
走或跑過幾公里的路?

一雙球鞋如果天天穿,
每天跑步五公里,
不出一年就應該要換, 不然膝蓋就要磨爛.
不出兩年是一定破的.
把一雙好好的球鞋放在鞋櫃裡一年穿兩次,
讓橡膠慢慢老化,
是浪費, 不是節省,
以後這種笨話少說幾句!