Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
After this week, I'm starting to believe that Murphy (whoever Murphy was, maybe one of my readers can enlighten me) was an optimist. No matter how bad Murphy thought it could get, I'm sure it could get worse. And that, ladies and gentlemen, about sums up my week.
It all started at work on Monday, when my boss arbitrarily decides that he wants me to mentor an undergrad. Sounds ok ... BUT let's reconsider this. I'm already mentoring a rotation student (who is absolutely awesome, and pretty self-sufficient, but that's not the point), I'm t-minus 2 weeks from giving a really big presentation to my department, and t-minus 7 weeks from my thesis proposal being due, and t-9 weeks from my oral exams. Perfect time to give me an undergrad, boss.
So the timing is terrible. It shouldn't surprise you that the undergrad is terrible as well. In the past 5 days he has:
- Said exactly 3 words to me (I'm pretty sure he speaks English fluently, but I have no evidence to support that claim).
- Stared at me for 5 minutes straight without saying a word.
- Fallen asleep while I was talking to him about his project (yup, I left him there and went home ... he woke up 3 hours later).
- Set my bench on fire 6 times (that's ok ... it's fireproof).
- Set my DESK on fire once (that's not ok ... it's not fireproof).
- Set my thesis proposal on fire (probably ok ... it's not that great anyway, haha)
As a consequence of having to babysit my undergrad, I've gotten exactly 0 words added to my thesis proposal in the past week, and very little of my big talk written. And every time something new happened, I thought, "well, it can't get worse than this ...", and the next day it did. Murphy was a damn optimist.
All I can say is that I hope next week is better!
At least today's 20 mile run went really well and I had a lot of fun :) Stay tuned for a movie script written about my life (if the person who wrote it gives me permission to publish it, that is), and more details about my first 20-miler.
3 comments:
re setting your thesis on fire: in 1834 John Stuart Mill was reviewing the only manuscript copy of Thomas Carlyle's history of the French Revolution (Vol. 1) --- and Mill's maid thought it was trash and accidentally burnt it ---- oops! (They remained friends; Carlyle had to rewrite it from memory and felt the second version was probably better than the one that got lost.)
^z
Hahaha, if only setting my thesis proposal on fire was the biggest worry on my mind right now.
This kid has almost burnt half the lab to the ground!
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