Slightly bitter

Il y a des jours ou je me reveille, ou je pense aux bonnes choses des derniers jours, et puis il y a ceux ou je me reveille triste en repensant a comment les chose tournent au vinaigre parfois. Je viens de deblaterer en anglais tout ce qui me serre la gorge depuis quelques mois. Ce qui est bete avec l anglais, c est que trop de monde le comprend, d'ou les quelques lignes en francais, en premier paragraphe, comme pour "cacher a merde au chat".

The last time it was scheduled for us all to meet, it wasn't really my choice. After all, who plans a meeting a mere 300 miles from home, on a friday afternoon?

The thought of having to drive down south, back to Mingland, and seeing them all again just made me feel sick for weeks. I wish I could have made a clean break, but apparently, that is not possible. The sad truth is, I have loads of corrections to make to my manuscript. The internal & external didn't like much of it, and decided to focus the entire viva on the chemistry part, by-passing totally the other 90% of my work, the molecular side of things. I end up having to work on a part of the project I learnt to dislike mainly because one of my Amazingly usefull supervisor decided not to return my calls sometime during my second year of work in the institute of doomness. The part I also learnt to disliked when someone really thoughtfull decided to throw 6 month of work down the drain "to free some freezer space". Since then, I hate QA for not even serving its purpose... Anyway, that s the kind of details my memory tends to erase, for my own sake, probably.

As the internal launched himself in a good cop - bad cop quest for the proper graphical representation of optical isomers, I began to crumble, realising that the viva itself would indeed be the anticlimax everyone told me about. And it was.

To cut a long story short, I end up to have to turn my manuscript round, to put huge emphasis on the internal and external's field of choice, the chemistry bit. Even if I despise it, and if it was a minimal part of my work.

The reason things went so bad is probably because out of three superv, one left, the second one spellt checked the discussion only, and the third one had a look to 2 of the result chapters. Submission within deadline was apparently inconvenient to their heavy work schedule, and it s always nice to know that superv rarely consider their students as a part of their work, but a side matter that gets only left-over time, if any.

After the viva, I came back to the Land of Goodness, relieved to escape Mingland, and all the old stories. A few days, I received a letter from them three, sounding cold and official, stating that they ought to be involved in the correction process, and that I should aknowledge their offer for support. The letter went on, turning the blame away from them. I felt sad mostly because of the years spent in the lab, trying to develop the project, compromising my relationship,  health and personnal savings. I believed in the project and wanted the group to solve the pathway. I did "side projects" for them, as they called it, and shouldn't have bothered, it just sounded so great to be able to be involved.

It all ended up around a round table, where everyone was very unsympathetic. They got me to leave the room in tear, which is quite an exploit in itself.

It takes two to tango. For example, my spelling is utter shite, and I should have maybe spend even more time over it. But their vision of the supervision is just wrong. Because I hated them for having me to write my stuff and auto-correct it.

After meeting them, I almost gave my resignation letter to my current boss, because it hurts not believing in the whole research thing anymore. Dr. A. told me not to do so. As he says, we still need to pay the bills, and he hardly earns enough to let me be a woman of leisure. So I started with the corrections, and tried to stick to their timetable, their guidelines, their requirements. I spend my nights doing it. And it grew on me again. I send the first draft back 2 weeks ago, as a hard copy, bound, by rapid mail. Since then, nothing, no letter, no phone call, no email. I don't even know if they'll open their envelops. About the same time, I send a review paper I just wrote, which will go through peer reviewing next week. Nothing about it came back, either.

I am really starting to wonder about the authorship, even if I know I can't really do anything about it.

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