Thursday, October 28, 2010
There is this Chinese saying: Walls have ears.
Today, I became the ear on the wall. I spent the entire day (plus yesterday and tomorrow) sorting out the data files of the adulterants ran on the instruments. It's a rather painful process, but I do not mind. At least, it's better than sitting around in the lab the whole day doing practically nothing at all. So I watched and heard all the happenings in the scientific officers' office today. There were some rather interesting events which occured:
1. I could not go to the toilet. My supervisor went upstairs to the lab. And in order to go to the toilet, I had to leave the office and come back in with the access card. My own temp card cannot access this office, so usually, I would call my sup when I come down to meet her. Today, she left me there for 3 hours in the morning and another 3-4 hours in the afternoon. Luckily, everytime she comes back she will ask me whether I want to go toilet lah.
2. Heard some gossips flying in the office! Apparently, the staff have this dislike for a certain head of department. Now that she's on study leave for 5 weeks, tongues wag loosely. Heard words like bootlicker, etc.. haha Anyway, the big boss is also on leave. And before big boss went on leave, miss bootlicker is super concerned over her flowers. Now that both are on leave, one of the scientific officers was told to take care of the flowers. She mentioned being afraid of the flowers dying. Another scientific officer casually said, "Then you can blame miss bootlicker..." Such politics! -.-"
3. This is something quite lame that brought a smile to my face. My sup went to ask another SO about a template for sending some emails. That SO asked my sup whether she needed it now. My sup hesitated and said, "Errrr, if now also can." Then the other SO, who was chatting with another SO replied, "Don't want. I want to chat now." The three of them burst out laughing. I giggled silently at my desk, and the smile lingered for a minute.
I have noticed that my sup is one who sort of doesn't like to gossip and just quietly does her work while being involved with her colleagues. As another intern said, she has really high EQ for someone who has such high educational qualifications. And I really agree with that. She is also super polite when asking others for help, myself included. It is these things which I must really learn from her so that I can survive when I go out and work in future! Extremely important!
- Walls have ears
by snoopy_lim @ 10:40 PM