Who's watching me?

My horoscope today: "The procrastination must end -- take a deep breath and finish what you started."

Ugh. Someone is spying on me. I can find more ways to avoid doing painful tasks. And it isn't like I am sitting around doing nothing. I just find the preferred things to do.

Hans has been giving me a hard time about that I need to just do it, finish it and walk away and not look back. This one task is stressing me out big time and so I am responding by shoving it on the backburner, which is not like me. I am not a procrastinator. My husband is a great procrastinator, I am not. Until this awful task came along.

I am actually embarrassed by my lack of work ethic on this task. I told the PM (former post-doc mentor that I cannot stand) I would do it. There is part of me that is ticked at not being put on the proposal, even as a "key collaborator", yet the bulkload of the ideas on the "how to" aspect of the proposal is mine. PM asked me if I had any ideas how to do this one idea he had and I told him how I would accomplish the goal. It was funded and I was repaid with a "well now do it". I think that is partly attributing to my "yeah, bite me" attitude regarding this project.

Another aspect is that well, not all the hardware is readily available. And when I scrounge it up once, the next day it has typically disappeared again. Par for the course for working with these guys. Hans suggested I hang a sign up saying "do not disturb instrument". Ha ha ha ha. Like that would do anything. Knowing these guys, that's an invitation to tick April off by messing with her stuff.

Then there is the last part, which dare I say... the ethics of the project. I know, after reviewing a recent proposal, that this idea for the experiment is pirated directly out of someone else's proposal, and somehow, the PM got wind of it and has decided to do it himself so he can go to the funding agent and say "woohoo, look what I did, neato huh?" and then "oh really, so and so proposed the same thing? Well now you don't need to fund them!" I can't call him on it because then I will be admitting to having access to the proposal, which is strictly confidential, as the peer review process must be. Ugh.

A scientist (15 years here) I was talking to the other day told me that she felt my former post-doc mentor was jealous of me for getting the proposal funded. I said, "I doubt that, he has his own projects." She said, "yes he does, but he has *never* landed his own large proposal and everyone knows it, everything he has was handed to him when 'so and so' went to do his DC stint".

Aww, the ethics of science. Science is a brutal field amazingly. From the outside we all just appear to be a bunch of introverted nerds. Inside, not so. From the inside we are idea stealing, credit taking, schmoozers with a very apparent pecking order. Ok, not all of us are, the rest of us fall subject to the first batch and in some twisted way aspire to be like the others like we did with the popular kids in high school. Can I change careers now? SAHM is sounding nice right now.