Dry run

It was a lab rule that anyone giving a talk had to have a practice run with the prof. This was supposed to be one on one but when my turn came, it didn't work out that way. Dr. L. was in deep denial about computers, but always wanted to impress colleagues with his state-of-the art knowledge of the latest technology. My talk had to use some LINUX presentation program with vertigo-inducing animation capabilities that Dr. L. found on a CD-ROM in some old magazine. And this meant that Dennis had to be there for the dry run. He could run any program on any computer. He had bytes in his fingernails.

          "Now Peter," Dr. L told me as I was ready to start. "This is your first conference presentation. I want you to be well prepared. Don't be frightened, but the crowd at some of these meetings is like a hoard of vultures, just waiting to tear meat from your limbs. Especially Kowzlowski... that cow. You've got to look sharp."

          "Uh, okay," I said, glancing over at Dennis, who gave me his finest gap-toothed smile. "Can I begin?"

          "Please do."

          The computer was balanced on a stool wheeled in from the lab. "Well, here's my first slide."

          "Is that how you're going to start?"

          "No, I was just..."

          "Say it how you're going to start."

          "Good afternoon, ladies and germs. My topic for my presentation..."

          "Hold on. Ladies and germs?"

          "They're microbiologists. It's a joke."

          "No it isn’t. Don't tell people what the topic is. They can read."

          "I'd like to talk about the results from my first year of thesis research..."

          "Dennis, I don't like the background on that slide. Is it green?"

          "No, it's red," Dennis answered.

          "Let's try it blue."

          "No problem." Dennis clicked the mouse around on the stack of journals that was the most uncluttered horizontal surface in the room. I realized then that the dry run of my ten minute talk would last at least two hours. None of the slides were right, they either had too much text or not enough. He didn't like the bullets... we had a ten minute discussion on whether they should be round or square. And he wanted me to refer to more of the lab's previous results in the discussion.

          "Okay, that's not bad, Peter," he said when I finally reached the end. "Now, let's see if you can handle the questions. Let's see... Dennis, can you think of anything?"

          "No," Dennis answered. He looked so much like some hippified version of Alfred E. Neumann, I had to laugh. He often used imaginary words and made cartoonish sound effects. This time he just gave me a wink.

          "What kind of question would that Kowzlowski ask?" Dr. L. wondered. "That cow. I know. In your fifth slide, weren't the correlation coefficients too low for you to make such sweeping statements about the relationships between your variables?"

          I glanced warily at Dennis. In addition to his Luddite approach to computers, Dr. L. was known for his utter ignorance of statistics. "That's a principal coordinate analysis," I told him. "I didn't do any correlation analyses."

          It was nearly four when we escaped. "I don't know what I'm going to do," I told Dennis. "He made you change every slide. I’ll have to relearn the talk, it's all different and I'm speaking tomorrow."

          "Don't worry. I saved the originals. You could never use the new ones... he's colour blind, didn't you know? I was just humoring him. Have you ever seen him talk? Holy neeble. You'll be fine as you are. But Kozslowski's going to have you for breakfast."

          "Is she really that bad?"

          "I've never met her but he's been ranting about her for years. The happiest I've ever seen him is the day he got one of her manuscripts for review. As far as I can tell, her lab does exactly the same work that we do, but they use a different bug."

          "I don't know, Dennis. I just want to concentrate on presenting my data. How bad can she be?"

          Celia and I handled the registration table the next morning. It was strange to suddenly have faces to match the names I'd known only as authors of papers. No one looked like they should. Dr. Needles was short and balding. Dr. Reid, who often wrote long, ponderous sentences full of vaguely alien syntax, turned out to be a woman. I half expected Dr. Kozslowski to be a rotund lady with a large nose, corresponding with Dr. L's nickname for her. Perhaps she would even be wearing a white dress covered with large, black spots.

          "Peter!" Dr. L. half-shouted at me, panting and red faced. "It's getting hot in here. Go see if you can find some air conditioners. Celia can handle the desk."

          Dr. L. was notoriously frugal and had booked the cheapest room on campus. He hadn't anticipated a heat wave at the beginning of June. I searched from lab to lab, accompanied by some undergrad muscle. No one wanted to part with their portable air conditioners, but we scrounged four units from our own lab and one of the teaching labs. When we got back to the conference room, the first session was already underway. They had opened the windows and turned on some fans to set up a cross breeze. A nervous little man with an Australian accent was finishing what had obviously been an awkward presentation. He was using overheads for visuals; gusts of wind kept blowing them off the projector onto the floor.

          "How's it going?" I asked Celia.

          "Kozlowski lit into Dr. L. after his opening monologue. Claimed he didn't acknowledge her as the first discoverer of the Q factor."

          "Which one is she?"

          "I don't see her now."

          My talk was first after the coffee break, and I tried to simultaneously calm and psyche myself with all that familiar advice about giving seminars:

          a) Check your fly before going to the podium.

          b) Check your hair in the mirror for cowlicks.

          c) Don't wash your hands in case you accidently splash water on your trousers.

          Dr. L. introduced me and there I was, trying to remember my opening lines. They had forgotten to plug in the laptop, of course, and the battery died just as I was about to begin.

          d) Always smile at the audience.

          All my Milton Berle jokes evaporated as I waited for the title slide to appear. Two or three people fussed around the computer while two or three others rushed over to stop one of the air conditioners from tipping out of the window. At last, the screen came to life, and I launched into my maiden speech. I can hardly remember anything I said. It seemed like someone else speaking. I watched the overheated, jet-lagged delegates struggling to stay awake, a few rocking side to side, suffering the diuretic effects of too much coffee.

          A hand was up in the audience. The chair nodded, and the woman asked, "Can you relate your results to the oppression of the women in patriarchal societies or the fall of the Berlin Wall?"

          "Pardon me?" The questioner was a petite woman with a strong New York accent. Short brown hair, kind of pretty beneath the thick glasses.

          "What I mean is, is this work actually relevant to anything? Does it have any significance to the plight of humanity on this planet? You haven't shown us anything we don't already know..."

          "This is only preliminary data. I'm just starting my thesis, there's still two more years to go..."

          The woman snorted and folded her arms. Everyone seemed to be alert and embarrassed. Finally, someone at the back of the room put me out of my misery with a banal question about the number of replicates in one of my experiments.

          I sat down. I had lost my scientific virginity. Instead of feeling excited and fulfilled, I had been a sacrificial lamb to a vampire cow.

          I hid for much of the afternoon, taking in one or two talks but unable to concentrate. My mind kept drifting back to the question, "Is this work actually relevant to anything?"

          Like most Masters students, my project was suggested by my supervisor and seemed cool enough, but I had to rely on his scientific judgment that it was really worth doing. Sometimes it felt trivial, a repetition of what was already known, just in a different system. I tempered this discomfort with the realization that I was learning a lot, and that the techniques would be useful no matter what direction I chose.

          Dr. L. managed to break away at the end of the day and track me down. "I don't want you brooding about this, Peter. She's just such a cow. She's always been jealous of my work and the people in my lab. Her comment was ridiculous. She made a huge fool of herself, not a fool of you."

          "You know, when I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronomer," I told him, "but I switched to biology because I didn't want to work nights."

          "Don't be ridiculous," Dr. L said. "You've got a great thesis project and you're in a world class lab. I want to see you at the session tomorrow morning and for the rest of the week. There's a lot you can learn from these people and no one will hold it against you that you couldn't handle Kozlowski."

          Then he was off down the hall, waddling like some kind of jackass penguin even though he wasn't wearing a tux, leaving me to contemplate my choice of careers. At this particular moment, a future as a car mechanic or maybe a bank teller seemed more likely than one as a scientist.

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