...and maybe he's a little on the bitter side.
Anyhow, Timon Buys has been doing a great job of looking after the Science Creative Quarterly's FILTER site, and today he put up something that is all kinds of awesome. link (also to hi-res version)
I'm curious - for those of you in the research arena - how often does this match your sentiment?
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Weird.
I definitely can identify with "choose working in the lab doing menial tasks and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning".
Some of those may be more relevant later (like the bit about teaching classes for the same pay as a janitor). And "hoop jumping instead of meaningful research" and "ulcers" I have definitely experienced, but they were worse in undergrad.
Some I just don't get... I mean, pipettors in a range of fucking volumes? Well yeah, of course. I kinda like them, myself. And thermocyclers/liquid nitrogen tanks/biosafety cabinets all rule. Now electroporators/ -20 freezers/ overly crowded chemical hoods are all on my shit list this week, so maybe that's the point. Though they are all causing problems by not being as available as I would like, rather than just being onoxious intrinsically. Playing with cool toys is one of the perks.
As opposed to? Choose industry? Choose profit over ethics? etc?
Choose high school teaching?
If you look around, very few people get up every morning and celebrate going to work. Most jobs are full of frustrations. (And, as an English phud, I don't even get really cool toys! But I do get some great books.)
This was my sentiment for almost the entirety of my final 18 months in thesis-land. Probably not by coincidence, this period corresponded to getting married and also trying to finish on (an impossible) schedule enabling my return to medical school on a timeline that would work for the next career step (residency match...) Now that I am in medical school, I imagine there are a lot of things like this that I could think/say about health care, but don't. It's either because I'm still new in the field or I've just found something that's a better fit. Time will tell.
Just my $0.02
I do sometimes feel like that. Of the series "I am getting paid minimum wage for a job that requires brains, while the administrative assistant over there gets paid double to fill in databases".
Sometimes it really gets me.
I relate to "Choose not being able to start a fucking family. Choose teaching classes after a decade of post-secondary education so you can earn as much as a janitor with seniority." Also repeated re-locations and hoop-jumping. But I'm still keen on the freedom; I know I could make much more money and maybe even have more stability in industry, but I don't want to sell my soul.
I related to quite a bit of that right before I left the lab and so didn't "choose" it. Intriguingly, as minouette says above going to industry is considered selling your soul, but I decided staying and feeling soulless wasn't a solution either. I do miss the liquid nitrogen tanks and spectrophotometers, but I don't miss the treading water, the menial tasks, and the repetition.
Since nobody seems to be picking up on the fact that this is a parody of a speech in "Trainspotting", in the same vein (pardon the pun):
"People think it's all about misery and desperation and grant proposals and all that shite, which is not to be ignored. But what they forget is the pleasure of it. Otherwise we wouldn't do it. After all, we're not fucking stupid. At least, we're not that fucking stupid.