Tuesday, 4 January 2005 03:01 pm
(no subject)
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deckardcanineThe results are in: my copyeditor training has been terminated. What a surprise. I wouldn't call it a firing, since it was only probationary in the first place.
It turns out that when ASM dismisses an employee (let's say a man), the HR director accompanies that employee to his office as he packs, gives him his last check, and escorts him out of the building before he has a chance to say goodbye to anyone. My dad was appalled, but my mom has known other companies to do the same. And like those companies, ASM doesn't let supervisors give recommendations; they can only confirm that the employee worked there for a given period. Neither my supervisor nor the HR director seemed comfortable with the arrangement, but the company goes by the book to the letter. The director said that her accompaniment to my office was not so much to ensure that I didn't steal, sabotage, or leave anything behind. It's not clear to me why else it would be required. To eyewitness the finalization?
It's times like these that my introversion is a plus. I had nice times with a few people, but I won't miss them anything terrible. Also, I don't much mind saying goodbye simply in an email.
What remains to be seen is whether my dismissal will turn out better or worse for me -- an uncertainty that has made my emotions of late difficult to define. It's certainly pleasant in the short run. Among other things, I didn't have to wait until Saturday for a haircut I'd been putting off. Of course, I do have to return to the torment of job hunting. I'm also looking into online courses on web design, focusing on the artistic aspect. (My mom says that my last meme reveals my creative side to have been bottled too long.)
At ASM, I had been compiling a document of things I found amusing in papers -- none of them errors, oddly enough. I missed my chance to send it home, but it wasn't very long, so I probably remember all the good ones. It shouldn't be a problem for me to give them here, since I won't reveal any information that hasn't been published by now.
"...to ensure that no primer dimers were present..." Primers are nucleotide sequences and dimers are a subset of polymers, but here they look like something different. It makes me think of slang for a kind of criminal, maybe the type to hang with the shady ladies. If that's what the researchers meant, no wonder they didn't want any around. To Brendan, the hinky-pinky sounded like a German punk rock band.
"...dual-color dot-plot graphics..." If he were just a tad more esoteric, Zippy the Pinhead would be repeating this phrase until it lost whatever meaning it had. My mom thinks it ought to have a melody, like a '50s-style jingle.
"...CHO cells..." This abbreviation is common enough to be in the style manual; I don't think ASM even sees the need to define it in publications. So what does CHO mean? Chinese hamster ovaries. I kid you not. My mom could remember the meaning months after I told her.
And being the comiconomenclaturist that I am, I took notice of some amusing researcher names, like "A. Pain" and "Yu, K." But nothing compared to the paper whose authors were surnamed Xu, Yu, and Wu. I guess their friend Zu got infected by his specimen of study and couldn't join them.
I still haven't written the fantasy I envisioned with all the names borrowed from microbiology. It may have an occult trio of Lords Serovar, Biovar, and Cultivar, conspiring against Lady Yersinia in the land of Enterica.
It turns out that when ASM dismisses an employee (let's say a man), the HR director accompanies that employee to his office as he packs, gives him his last check, and escorts him out of the building before he has a chance to say goodbye to anyone. My dad was appalled, but my mom has known other companies to do the same. And like those companies, ASM doesn't let supervisors give recommendations; they can only confirm that the employee worked there for a given period. Neither my supervisor nor the HR director seemed comfortable with the arrangement, but the company goes by the book to the letter. The director said that her accompaniment to my office was not so much to ensure that I didn't steal, sabotage, or leave anything behind. It's not clear to me why else it would be required. To eyewitness the finalization?
It's times like these that my introversion is a plus. I had nice times with a few people, but I won't miss them anything terrible. Also, I don't much mind saying goodbye simply in an email.
What remains to be seen is whether my dismissal will turn out better or worse for me -- an uncertainty that has made my emotions of late difficult to define. It's certainly pleasant in the short run. Among other things, I didn't have to wait until Saturday for a haircut I'd been putting off. Of course, I do have to return to the torment of job hunting. I'm also looking into online courses on web design, focusing on the artistic aspect. (My mom says that my last meme reveals my creative side to have been bottled too long.)
At ASM, I had been compiling a document of things I found amusing in papers -- none of them errors, oddly enough. I missed my chance to send it home, but it wasn't very long, so I probably remember all the good ones. It shouldn't be a problem for me to give them here, since I won't reveal any information that hasn't been published by now.
"...to ensure that no primer dimers were present..." Primers are nucleotide sequences and dimers are a subset of polymers, but here they look like something different. It makes me think of slang for a kind of criminal, maybe the type to hang with the shady ladies. If that's what the researchers meant, no wonder they didn't want any around. To Brendan, the hinky-pinky sounded like a German punk rock band.
"...dual-color dot-plot graphics..." If he were just a tad more esoteric, Zippy the Pinhead would be repeating this phrase until it lost whatever meaning it had. My mom thinks it ought to have a melody, like a '50s-style jingle.
"...CHO cells..." This abbreviation is common enough to be in the style manual; I don't think ASM even sees the need to define it in publications. So what does CHO mean? Chinese hamster ovaries. I kid you not. My mom could remember the meaning months after I told her.
And being the comiconomenclaturist that I am, I took notice of some amusing researcher names, like "A. Pain" and "Yu, K." But nothing compared to the paper whose authors were surnamed Xu, Yu, and Wu. I guess their friend Zu got infected by his specimen of study and couldn't join them.
I still haven't written the fantasy I envisioned with all the names borrowed from microbiology. It may have an occult trio of Lords Serovar, Biovar, and Cultivar, conspiring against Lady Yersinia in the land of Enterica.
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Don't ascribe too much importance to it - your pretty fresh out of college, and it's something you tried that didn't work out. All of life is a grand experiment.
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Say, did you ever answer the five questions you requested?
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I hope to be able to do that tomorrow, at which point it should appear on your friends list.
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