Little Asia

Someone told me I should start writing down all the amusing little stories about my lab, to keep the for the generations to come. So I decided to do so, starting today.

Let’s start from the beginning, this October our group suddenly got much bigger. We got two new PhD students, three new MChems and an exchange student from Singapore. Theoretically, they should have all  started work in October (except the exchange student, she started a little bit earlier). In reality, we haven’t really seen them that much ‘cause apparently they all had more important stuff to do then their degrees. The exchange student, let’s call her Y., showed up for few hours on the first day and then she took the next day off to do some shopping. Apparently she had some serious purchases planned, because we haven’t seen her for the next five weeks. Our new PhD students, L. from China and C. from Malaysia (however in the beginning we were convinced she’s from Thailand) started right away. First week they had to attend all the stupid introductory training and seminars that all the starting PhD students have to in the beginning (me and S. (other PhD that started the same time as me) skipped most of those, under an excuse that we’ve already done most of them before (S. did her undergrad degree here and I was here three years ago as an exchange student)). Then, in the second week of the term, all the Graduate School courses have started. And those two apparently took an ambition to participate in all of them; Women empowerment in PhD, Self Motivation, Creative Nose Picking and other crap like that. In the spare time they started “working” in the lab. Subsequently we have discovered some surprising facts about them. We’ve already knew that L. knowledge of English is somewhat limited, however we haven’t suspected how much. Basically, most of the time he wasn’t able to understand what we were saying to him, however we haven’t discovered that right away, because when you talk to him, he always nods and says “Yes, yes”. But after few times someone told him to do something and the he did something completely different, we started to suspect that “Yes, yes” might actually mean “I have no idea what you just said to me, you capitalistic pig”. So the next conversation looked something like that:

-So you know what to do?

–Yes, yes.

-Are you lying to me?

-Yes, yes.

-You have no idea what I’ve just said.

-Yes, yes.

Problem with L. is that he doesn’t really ask questions. He does things wrong way (which can be very dangerous in chemistry lab) and even if you tell him the right way, he’ll either not understand you or ignore you, ‘cause he knows better anyways…

Gosh, it’s 3am – I’ll continue on some other day.