From Lab, With Fly

I was having lunch in the conference room, which doubled as a dining room at lunch time. Suddenly Q, who was a secretary of the department and sitting next to me, waved her hands in front of and above her for about 5 seconds. When she finished waving, she turned to me and said accusingly:

"A fruit fly! Lei! It must be you! You brought it down here!"

"But," I protested,"I thought I killed all of them before I stepped out of the lab."

She laughed:"Blame your lab, then."

Yeah. It's like my lab is responsible for every fruit fly in the building.

This reminded me of a story told by a faculty candidate over a welcome lunch.

The lab he worked in as a post-doc had a fruit fly lab neighbor. From time to time, they would find fruit flies lingering around their lunch boxes or coffee cups, which affected their appetite to a certain level. They could have run over to their neighbor and yelled at them. But their high education prevented them from doing so. So they just set up a fly trap and caught quite a few of them. Then they put them into a test tube, put the test tube into an envelope, sticked on the address-labels printed out by a computer and put the envelope into their neighbor's mailbox. When their neighbor received the envelope, they thought it came from some governmental "Biohazard Control Office". In the envelope they found the test tube and a note saying:

"We believe they belong to you."