This is the end, beautiful friend

Since after my break in August I have been counting days. This Friday will be the last day at work in the old workplace. The Monday after will be the first day in the new lab.

In my mind I have started celebrating already this weekend. The main reason being that the university office has finally produced the document confirming my employment with this obscure Western Japanese private university. Till the very last moment the bureaucrats here kept me waiting and unsure about the future. I had even started to prepare Plan B to take out some heavy negotiating artillery on them this week had they not given me that paper. But thankfully they did.

This means my application for employment at the new place that was due on 1 October can finally be submitted. Right on time. Well, ok, not really. It is three weeks past the deadline. But “there was nothing that could have been done about it”.

Over the next weekend I need to move from the sticks in Western Japan to Tokyo. There is all the packing still to do, and of course I do not particularly like packing. So I decided to procrastinate a little and write a post here instead.

I have done many house moves this year. After the university officials kicked me out of their accommodation in April I moved house with about monthly frequency. At the beginning I made a joke about it becoming a hobby, to which I got a comment: “That strikes me as a rather masochistic hobby.”

What started as a joke turned into reality of the masochistic hobby. I moved house at the end of April, end of May, beginning of July, then I was technically homeless, with my things in storage, until mid-August. Lived with a friend for a month, moved house mid-September and now I am moving again. This makes it six moves in half a year...

Initially after setting up the “final countdown” to the last day at work I did not believe that it could/would happen. But by changing the countdown counter every day the message started sinking in. I have put in some final efforts at work, but it was not really possible to do one-year's worth of work in the last six weeks, so there will be no results or publications for me resulting from last year.

At least I set up a system for them, and Talented Postdoc is now writing up a grant (for himself, i.e. for his own employment with Big Old Boss) to use this system for future experiments. Is that fair? No. But recently I learned that expectation of fairness in life can bring people down. It certainly brings me down, so I decided to let go of this expectation. Sometimes you get into this position where someone employs you to rip the benefits of your work only for themselves. And there is nothing you can do about it.

It is easy to recognize such PIs, once you work for them, because they do not want to invest in you, they do not let you go to conferences, nor set up your own collaborations or side-projects. These are the PIs who take the slave-colony approach to having postdocs in their labs. BOB took it to the extreme level, by even being angry at me for “wasting time” on reading up the literature on the project. According to him literature review is a waste of time for someone who only has one year in his lab. Such a postdoc should spend 100% of their time producing results in the lab. Yeah, but if you want me to be your technician, give me protocols then and not expect to know your system without reading.

BOB rejected all the suggestions about how the project could be improved that I had given them at the group meeting at which I presented. Because he was angry at me. He put me down in front of all the other group members for “wasting my time on reading” and not producing results. Later they took all the suggestions I made and incorporated them into the project plan and into the grant application they are writing now. Oh well, that does not need any comment. Actions speak louder than words.

I am so glad that the nightmare ends this Friday. I am turning my face to the future with hope. Stay tuned.