Christmas and the laboratory

I like Christmas on Wednesday, because the 'natural' last day of work is ambiguous. The last days before Christmas are like a coastline, where we stop and stare across empty space at the horizon, taking stock of what can safely be left behind and what we need to carry into the new year. December is filled with parties; institutional parties, directors' parties, departmental parties, lab parties, parties in the labs of collaborators, home parties, restaurant parties. Optimistic grad students hang plastic mistletoe over laboratory doors, which are decorated with Petri dishes, bubble wrap, tubing, wires, glassware, styrofoam peanuts, disposable plastics, arranged into Christmas trees, snowmen, candy canes, reindeers or sleighs. Who should get a present? The boss, the supervisor, the alpha colleague? The students, the technicians, that lady who looks after the accounts, the guys in the storeroom, the person who sorts the mail? The IT guys who rescue you every time something interferes with your destiny of spending eight hours a day staring at a monitor, the janitorial staff who mop the halls every night, the people who run the cafeteria? Will there be an institutional Christmas card? Must we pay the postage ourselves? It's a business expense, right? Students catch the bus or the train or a plane or drive their cars held together with duct tape onto icy roads and visit their families and old friends who don't quite understand this mysterious world called the laboratory. 

We want to spend December cleaning up the lab and sorting out messes but it never happens. Everyone tries to clear their desks by finishing what needs to be finished. And then they send it to someone else who is trying to clean off their own desk. Most years, there a few hours on my own before going home, trying to decide what can be rescued from neglect, what needs to be written down so that I will remember it when the break is over. Each year, the time needed is longer, the time available shorter. Around the world, colleagues who follow different religions or perhaps no religion at all, know that everything stops in The West for two weeks and they take part in this collective deep breath. Then, like winding up a stalled clock, we all start to plan our work for the coming year, and the white boards by our office doors are covered with optimistic, colour coded to-do lists. 

Last year, one of the items on my hidden list was this blog. It's difficult to decide if I am satisfied, because I didn't know what would emerge from my own imagination and memories, or from the readers who stumble across my words. We'll see how this modest ripple behaves and if it survives after passing over the sandbar between now and the new year.