Two bits of funny...

One

The installation of the G2 has been a pain to say the least. The engineer who's done all of it thus far is not my favorite person in the world. He's never satisfied with anything, is painfully slow and inefficient. I had to order a brand new solvents and glassware that took forever to show up. The whole process has taken much longer than it was supposed to have taken. And for a while it was looking like it might interfere with my plans to go to Death Valley over Easter - it's been very back and forth and up in the air. As soon as I think I'm clear to go, I get another email or something that makes it look like maybe not after all. After my latest text message to my roommate (who's also in limbo about going pending being required to attend a surprise meeting on Friday) saying my going was in limbo yet again, I get the following response from her:

"Boo. Given the proportion of the instrument saga, this thing better cure cancer or some $h!t."

Yeah...probably not. Perhaps that's less funny to you, but I found it hilarious.

Two

One of my labmates is rather awkward (ok, so several of my labmates are rather awkward, we're chemists, it's inevitable). He very easily gets quite worked up, and has rather funny tics when he does. So we tend to call him C3PO (if you ever saw it you'd understand). Understandably, an a non-native English speaker, he misunderstands stuff all the time. When he began grad school, he was unmarried and childless, and extremely distraught about it. At some point before I joined the lab, his parents arranged a marriage for him, and he is now married and the father of a 1 year old son. (As bad as I would have felt for his daughter, I'm still a little bummed he had a son as I'm sure a daughter wouldn't have been received with nearly as much excitement.) This labmate also had a bad habit of frequently asking female lab students inappropriate questions. Depending on your circumstances, he would ask any combination of "Why don't you have a boyfriend?" Or if you had a boyfriend, "Why aren't you married?" Or if you were married, "When are you going to have a baby?" It was obnoxious to say the least.

My college roommate is getting married this fall, and we were talking about the possibility of me going to PDX to go dress shopping in April. Well, April is already looking rather insane. So I was looking at the calendar and having a minor freak out while one of our postdocs and another labmate are around. C3PO hears the word "marriage," and since the other two people in the room were married and engaged, respectively, he looks at me and says, "Are you getting married?!" I'll confess that many of us rather enjoy messing with him. It wouldn't be nearly as satisfying if it weren't so easy. I can see our postdoc's face breaking into a huge grin, so I reply, "Yes! I'm getting married." C3PO looks at me rather surprised and says, "REALLY?!" So I repeat, "Yes! I'm getting married." This exchange repeats itself a couple of times. And in my head I'm already playing out how far I could take this, and how hilarious it would be when he said something to our advisor about me getting married. I've got stories about a shotgun wedding or a mail-order Russian groom circulating in my head. And then my labmate ended the fun by telling me not to mess with him... Sad. The possibilities were endless. :)