While at lab today (note the date) I had to go searching through a former graduate student’s lab notebook. There was a discrepancy between a paper and his thesis (it was minor just a plasmid name), but I had to figure out which one was correct. As I was flipping through I found that he editorialized things quite a bit. Here are a few of the more interesting things that I found:
– A smiley face next to a fluorescence trace.
– An entire page taken up by the word “F*ck”
– Detailed instructions on how to change a car’s oil
– A couple of entries with times and dates that had the words “See! I should be asleep!” next to them.
– Several cryptic notes
– A nice farewell letter to Advisor on the last page.
Cryptic notes are a no-no in lab notebooks, but otherwise you might have been reading some of my notebooks! I’ve been known to write “moron,” “YAY”, and “woot-woot”…to name a few. 🙂
I call myself names frequently in my notes. When Boss gets on his “do it my way” kick, you’ll find the words Olde Tyme in there, too. You can also usually gauge the badness of my mood a/o sleep quality by how I describe my results–i.e. the number of four letter words. One of my favorite notebooks to go back to is one from a postdoc who left about a year and a half ago. If she were pleased with something, she’d usually describe it as “Sooper-Dooper Good!!”
Looking back to something I’d done about a year ago, I did find a few remarks that someone new to the group might consider to be cryptic, referring to having to put experiments on hold for a week or two while waiting for a shipment of something to arrive because I wasn’t allowed to use the supply we already had.
My notebooks look a bit like journals sometimes, too. You can tell how frustrated I was by how many f-bombs I wrote. I’ve got one PCR entry that has the reaction recipe and protocol and written beside it is this:
“Wrong f*ing primers.”
Only, you know, without the asterisk.
Over at Drugmonkey, Physioprof has said several times that the whole Open Notebook movement is a bad idea simply because people are prone to editorialize in their notebooks and who wants that available for the world to see?
UR: Well, I think the notes were to himself about things going on in the lab at the time. They didn’t appear to be related to lab work.
TT: I like the “Sooper-Dooper Good.” I may use that. I do have to say that the editorialization made flipping through the notebook more amusing.
Mrs. Whatsit: Yep, he had a few of those. I do that a bit, too. A lot of times I’ll call on FSM to use his noodly appendage. I hadn’t thought about the OA issue that DM and PP bring up. I’m not sure that our former grad student would like the world to hear about his additions to the notebook.
My grad school lab books are rather editorialised. And the comments are often cryptic, partly because it felt wrong to openly write what I felt about my supervisor or my colleagues at the time, especially as I would often need to flip through the book or leave it open at a particular page in public, partly because it wasn’t a journal. So the occasional ‘another ice day’ meaning that fellow grad student who had a very erratic working pattern was bored and had been messing around (which occasionally involved picking up ice from the machine outside the lab next door and dropping it down people’s necks when they were bent peacefully over their microscopes) or ‘had to tidy desk’ (meaning supervisor was on a bit of a rampage and I’d come under fire again).
My lab books now are less annotated, perhaps because I spend so little time in the lab… but I also have a series of computer notebooks for data crunching and model running, and they are much more scribbled over – doodles, swearing, comments like ‘WHY DID I EVER THINK THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA?’ and the occasional ‘Yes!!! X is SOOOO wrong about this’ (I’m petty sometimes) scrawled in large letters… maybe this has something to do with the fact that I won’t ever need to leave these notebooks for future use?
I used to write little side comments about my experiments in my lab notebook when I was a grad student. But then the number of times I had to call myself an idiot just became too depressing….
My comments did amuse other people in lab who had to read my notebook after I left, though, so at least someone got some enjoyment out of it! 🙂
JaneB: Maybe that’s what those notes were? I’ve heard tell that this grad student’s relationship with his contemporaries were good for the most part, but even the best of friends get annoyed with each other at times.
Mad Hatter: Well, they amused me 🙂 So, I appreciated them.
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