Friday, June 24, 2005

Faux Pas

Ling, a Chinese student in my lab, asked me:

"What's pussy?"

I looked at her and said:

"Errr...little cat."

"No. It doesn't make sense. Some other meaning?"

"Why not look it up yourself?"

"I looked," she held up her tiny pocket English-Chinese dictionary,"it says 'little cat',too. But it doesn't make much sense."

"It also means this," I took out my pocket pc, found its "proper" meaning in the digital dictionary, and showed it to her.

She read it, blushed and said,

"I knew it means something bad."

"Don't worry," I comforted her, "it happens to many people."

So I told her the stories of Mei, another Chinese girl who did rotation in my lab a few years ago. Once she asked my boss a question when he walked out of his office for a cup of coffee:

"What's dick?"

"Errr...it's the nick name for Richard."

"No. The place I read it, it probably means some thing."

"Oh, boy, what were you reading? Err...let's just say it's some organ men have but women don't."

With that, my boss turned around and went back to his office, without coffee.

She realized what she had just asked, blushed and said:

"My God, I did it again! Oh!"

Then Mei told me another story of her:

She did her first rotation in Hall's lab when she first came here from China. She wanted to give him a good impression so she often worked late till 11 pm. Another graduate student in the lab, Tom, was also a hard-working guy so they often worked together in the night and developed good friendship.

One night, around nine o'clock, all of a sudden, she asked Tom,

"Tom, do you happen to have a rubber?"

He stared at her, wide-eyed, for a full minute before he said:

"What???"

She thought he didn't understand her because of her Chinese accent, so she repeated:

"Do you have a RUBBER?"

He was still staring so she add:

"You know, I was writing this stuff and I found some mistakes so I want to correct them..." and she pointed to the piece of paper she was writing on.

He immediately relaxed and said:

"Sure. Here you are. By the way, it's called ERASER."

"You sure scared poor old Tom!"I laughed out loud.

She cried out innocently:"How would I know rubber means condom in the States? We learned the word rubber in the middle school English textbook! Don't you remember? -'What is this?' -'This is a ruler.' -'What is that?' -'That is a rubber!'How can they change this to such a bad meaning?!"

The takehome lesson: stop reading textbooks and start watching porn.

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Mean Boss

We were out of fly food today.

If science is the spirit of a fly lab, then food is its flesh. Would there be spirit without flesh?

We needed food! Today!

We, the graduate students plus the boss, used to take turns to make food for the lab. And let's face it, it wasn't the most pleasent job in the life science world. But ever since my boss hired an undergraduate student to take charge of this business, our lives became much easier.

So I went to him:

"Will, we are out of food. Do you have time to make some today?"

"Oh, man,"he immediately complained,"it's 90 degrees outside, and you want me to stir the boiling food in that no air conditioning kitchen?"

That was true. It was so hot today that I had to go directly to the 4 degree cold room to cool down when I walked in from outside this morning.

Then I realized: "OMG, I must have sounded like a mean boss to him!"

But I was not a boss, and I was certainly not mean!

I ended up making food with him.

Oh, man, how we sweated!

The take-home lesson: Science could be mean.

Sunday, June 19, 2005

Language Barrier

Oh, it's always there:
http://interwhores.com/downloads/iraq.wmv

Monday, June 13, 2005

I'm not talking!

Every other week at 11:45 am we have a "germline" meeting, where people from three "germline labs" gether together and listen to one person to present his or her work.

The order of the talks are usually scheduled this way: the three bosses go first, then the senior students, and the junior students go last. So my boss's talk was scheduled in early March, and mine was today. But my boss wanted to switch talks with me because: "you have more data than I do. Do you mind if I let you go first?"

Of course I didn't mind.

So today it was my boss's turn to present. At 11:45, when it was supposed to begin, only people from our lab were in the room.

Five minutes later, the mouse lab people came. But the worm lab people were still missing. So Bill, a mouse guy, took out his cell phone and called Shing, a worm guy:

"Hello, Shing, it's Bill."

"..."

"I'm doing pretty good."

(Everybody laughed.)

"..."

"Yeah. So are you guys coming to the meeting?"

"..."

"Oh, no," Bill looked at me and smiled strangely,"It's not Lei. It's his boss talking today."

(Everybody except me laughed. I managed to laugh about 4 seconds later.)

When they came they said:"Oh we completely lost track of time. We thought it began at noon."

Yeah, right.