This is so off-the-cuff, I’m embarrassed. And then I remember that I could talk about politics or my personality and garner far more comments, and wonder about my choices of subjects.

While the repairman works on my dryer this morning, I have quickly saturated in re-reading drafts to submit to the AERES evaluation agency for my co-workers. I am equally bored with writing my own résumé of the last four years. I need to apply all those coffee jitters to something! And the various articles to which I thought I would react in a future blog post here and there are sitting on my desk at lab.

Cath mentioned in one of those interminable if highly evocative of the scientific coffee break comment threads, that the best thing that ever happened to her professionally was to have an office where she could close the door.

I WANT ONE OF THOSE!

(I was going to type “I can haz…?” then thought better of it).

Working on the computer at home doesn’t cut it. I get up and launch a load of laundry, I put away the dry dishes when I get bored, I have a multitude of other useful distractions besides Internet. In lab I can control that impulse to wander on the web, mostly because I’ve been indulging it for the last twenty years and can take a break here and there. But pairing up socks versus self-assessment? No contest.

I am too empathetic for my own good. I can easily put myself in the position of any of my hierarchical superiors and think, what good does it do to demand a fully-fledged segregated office space for myself? They can’t do it – or else it would be shared with up to five other people, much worse than being two or three intermittent people passing through the lab and having a corner there to myself and a stool on rollers on which to perch.

If it were too comfortable, there would be no need to get up. I might even put my feet in crocs – no, wait, I don’t have any – up on the desk.

Back to the grindstone. But if anyone has any tips for injecting 200,000 cells into a spongy tissue sheet that is 0.3 mm thick and can tolerate 50-100 microlitres of volume, that rely on low-tech materials, I’m happy to hear them.

Ah – repairs are finished. So I’ll just throw those sheets in the dryer and head over to lab now.