Going to see the ghost of the past

It is only a beginning of my journey with Young Professor and next week I am setting off to a local conference already. My new advisor had seen no problem in paying from the grant for me to go there. I am only going there to explore the research and for networking, as I have not yet generated any data for presentation in my first week of the new job.

My former supervisor, Big Old Boss, would never let me go to conferences, even for just two days, unless I would be presenting. He thought of conferences as a waste of time and money. He though that the place of a postdoc is in the lab, in the same way some men think that the place of a woman is in the kitchen.

Unfortunately, I had no opportunity to say good-bye to BOB in the last week of my former employment. I guess he avoided creating such an opportunity himself, because of the disappointment of having in his lab and wasting his money on a person who had not produced a nice and complete set of results for him to go and show around at conferences. Btw he goes to quite a lot of conferences and on different continents, and no wonder that he has no money left for sending his postdocs to any...

I guess not even seeing BOB in the last week was one of the reasons why I had no proper sense of closure on my previous job. No good-bye lunch, no good-bye to the group (only individually to some people) and my supervisor not even seeing me before I leave. Quite an unpleasant ending of a year spent together.

When BOB emailed me at the last minute that he will only have time to meet me the next day's morning and I could not have come in then (I had the moving-company appointment arranged for that time already), I offered consolidatory “I will see you at the local conference in two weeks time”.

I guess I had been feeling guilty that I was not going to come in on his command, but I was not going to add even more stress and rearrange my moving dates at the last moment, just so that we could shake hands. If he really cared he could have given me a bit more notice about his plans.

I have mentioned about this event already, so writing about it here again just shows how much of resentment I’ve got built up towards him. I guess I am still recovering from the stress I was under when working there.

Last week, when I was arranging my travel plans to the conference, I had a dream. I dreamt that I met BOB there and that I have told him to his face what I thought about him. He started puffing and that got me terrified: “OMG, what have I done! He is going to get angry now!”. I got so stressed that I woke up...

I know that in reality I am going to play nice, and I would never tell him what I think to his face, not even if it was in a much more direct culture, and not in Japan. But in the dream the reality was quite different and I guess my unconscious was purging the resentment build-up over the last several months.

I would rather not see him again. At all. Ever. It is like seeing an ex that has hurt you. It would be better if they were dead!

But I do wonder how it will go to see him again, are we going to talk, or just pass each other kindly nodding in the corridor? We will see.