Thursday, August 28, 2008

"F dash-dash-dash"*

My thesis is a piece of crap. I'm going to throw it out, go back to work and pretend it never existed.

Okay, I'm not. But this will haunt me for the rest of my life. I'll be 90 years old with no teeth, Alzheimer-ridden, sitting on the porch of the nursing home telling anyone and everyone, "I really don't think I screwed up! How could I have screwed that up?!" Augh.

I still don't see how I could have made such an elementary mistake but I must have done. There's no other reasonable explanation. Unless my nitrates grew fins and swam away. My stock solution was fine. But so was my dilution today. As it was back in May when I ran this experiment the first time. Argh.

Anyway, there's nothing I can do to fix it. Fortunately, my supervisor says that I don't have to rerun the experiment. My thesis will be a giant, undefensible pile of crap. But so what? It's not like I go to a real university anyway.

I should be less vitriolic. I'm glad my supervisor isn't making me rerun it. Very, very glad. So relieved I could cry from sheer exhausted appreciation (sound of my knees hitting the deck and my forehead hitting the floor at his Birkensocked feet). He was very sympathetic. I was all ready to change my enrollment status to part-time, start working again full-time and do whatever lab work I could manage on cold, wintry weekends when I have nothing better to do.

On a totally unrelated note, I would have John Mayer's Daughters.

*Thanks to Fish for this title.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Your thesis is not a piece of crap. Stop calling your thesis crap. Use of the word crap is unfounded. No more crap talk.

Research is an unforgiving hell-bitch. Just have a good cry and a drink, then go set something or someone on fire and it'll all be OK the next morning.