One of the pleasures of coming to lab early is the freedom you get – every equipment has your name written on it, every bench eagerly anticipates that you’ll keep your samples on them, every hood welcomes you with open arms and every Mac waits for you to open facebook or read PhD comics in them.

One of those days…

I had my experiment running from 7-45am. I knew the day would go by pretty smoothly without any hitch. We generally have to schedule our time to use the tissue culture hood (in laymen terms, the hood is where we play around with cells) because we have one hood and five people. But what’s the hurry? There’s no one around. Heck! No one’s gonna be around till 9. And so I immersed myself into the magical world of farmville and other facebook games.

Folks started streaming into the lab. Ahhh… they just came now; they have to still talk about how much whisky they had over the weekend (Americans!), some incomprehensible conversations about the Steelers game (the Steeler fans defy rationality) and about some fancy new restaurant that serves awesome salads with extra lettuce. And thus, I refused to schedule my hood-time.

My advisor started using the hood first. He deserves it … after all, its his. His money. Go for it buddy! When he was out, post-doc walks in. And me thinks, “hmmm… maybe I’ll go book a slot”. And the rest was history!

It was overbooked! Till frikkin 9pm. I come to lab at 7-30am, and now I gotta hang around till night? Hunter to the hunted… I went around begging co-workers for 10-minute slots. But apparently everyone had such important experiments to carry out in the hood (as if everyone were on the verge of a great discovery), that my requests kept bouncing all over. I propose, they dispose!

I walked up and down the lab corridors hoping someone will yield. Thankfully and surprisingly, the villain of my life – my lab technician, yielded. She gave me my ten minutes at 5pm and hence my freedom by 6pm.

And I always laughed at the stupidity of the hare who couldn’t win over the tortoise…