don’t know how much longer I can stay in this lab…

…because it completely sucks.  My boss is a total sh$thead who masquerades as a decent person.

Last week I took 4 days of bereavement leave after my grandfather died. I’m actually allowed 5 days, but I chose to save 1 for the internment of my grandpa’s ashes in Arlington Cemetary next spring. 2 days were spent with my grandmother and family in North Carolina, and 2 days were spent driving the 9+ hour trip back and forth from Pittsburgh.  I had to cancel a meeting with my boss last Thursday because I was in the car driving back when we were supposed to meet.  I cancelled our meeting 5 days in advance and requested that we reschedule it ASAP since we’re trying to get a paper out to a journal.

Today it became clear that I’m being punished for having a life outside of work (How dare I have a family with elderly relatives?!?).  I’ve now contacted him three times asking to reschedule the meeting, and he just refuses to answer.

Also, on the aforementioned paper, he sent it back today with a rather snide comment in the email… something to the effect of “Please note that several of the changes in the discussion are ones I’d already made in a previous draft.”  This is patently untrue.  He made thorough comments on draft #1 of this section, I revised the entire section in draft #2, and addressed his few comments on it before sending draft #3 to him today.  I’m flabbergasted, because today’s comments were brand new, never-before mentioned ideas and critiques of this manuscript.

Maybe to put this all in context I should explain… my boss doesn’t seem to believe in positive feedback, ergo I’m doing well when there’s no negative feedback.  But, lately it seems all I get is negative feedback. I’m not fast enough. My ideas are too jumbled. I apparently make the same mistakes over and over again. I just don’t know what else to do… I work in my office all day long, usually writing, doing analyses for collaborative papers, managing his data, etc… I rarely even take a proper lunch.  This might not be manual labor, but it’s mentally grueling.  I submit written work for review, get my usual slew of bad comments back in two different colored highlights in microsoft word, fix and revise, turn around again… just to get more negative feedback.  Plus, I’m not permitted to submit these articles to journals in which I actually have a chance to get published. Instead I’m only allowed to submit to the best of the bunch, only to be rejected by my “peers.”  If I don’t publish, I can’t get a job when I’m out of here. Period. Game over, time to find a new career. But the more time I waste submitting to unsuitable journals, the fewer chances I have to get published elsewhere…

My trusted friends in the lab (count them… 2 people) advise me to do cognitive reframing and let it go as much as I can, but I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to do that. It’s never been my strong suit, and I’m afraid that I won’t be able to keep the contempt and frustration out of my next interaction with my boss. I’ve also been advised that confronting him is a bad idea, and that people who’ve done this in the past have only made trouble for themselves. I wouldn’t do this — it’s craziness, considering that I’ll have to ask him for letters of rec in a year.  But I’m already worried about said letters of rec… I want to get out of here and get a decent job, but I’m afraid of how his letter will read because it seems I’ve already been pegged a certain way.  I’m pretty sure this happened to my predecessor, who was on the market for 3 years in a row before he had a job offer elsewhere.

I’ve never really felt like a part of this lab, in no small part because my training is different.  There is a hierarchy in psychology, in which clinicals are superior to everbody else. I work in a clinical lab and put up with this every day, even from students who are just starting their programs.  Obviously us developmentalists are lesser than clinical psychologists. I try to take it with humor, but one can only take it for so long… I don’t fit in here, am not viewed as an equal, and am not being treated as a colleague or even as a postdoc who deserves a modicum of respect.

been told I need to blog more often

I’m running some painfully-slow analyses in another window right now, which gives me the chance to write a little bit.

Here’s a little about what’s going on for us:

1 – I had another paper rejected last week. It was very upsetting because we’d been working on it for 3.5 years and the reviews were unnecessarily mean. To some degree, I was more invested in this paper than my dissertation, which made the rejection all the more upsetting. We are going to revise the paper again and submit it to another journal, but right now none of us have the mental wherewithall to do it. I also have 2 other papers ahead of it in my queue at the moment. Had I known that my career choice involved so much rejection, I may have made other choices… my skin has become a bit thicker but it’s still hard to get these types of reviews on papers. This one made me think that I’m too stupid to be in research and that I should just plan on getting a job at a liberal arts college after finishing my postdoc….

2 – I’m taking a class in structural equation modeling this semester. No, I don’t expect any readers to know what that means. In a nutshell, it’s painful stats based on matrix algebra for mega-nerds. Worst of all, I’m one of the best mega-nerds in the class. Woo-hoo!

3 – We watched “LOST” last night. I love it, but Hubby kept getting mad about all the commercials on U.S. tv. We even recorded it on the DVR and fast-forwarded all the commercials in order to reduce his annoyance. It didn’t work very well. In his own words, “Commercials and rye bread with caraway seeds can go to hell!”

We also enjoyed last night’s “South Park.” It was about WoW (World of Warcraft), an online role-playing type of game that is enjoyed by both of my brothers and also Hubby’s little brother. I thought I was a big nerd, being all knowledgeable about super-nerdy matrix algebra stats… but I was wrong. Anybody who plays WoW is way, way, WAY nerdyier than I could ever possibly be. (By the way, the super-nerd guy who builds up his character so much that he can kill other innocent players’ characters looks just like my brother will look in another 20 years…)

Ok, analyses have finished running and now I have to go do real work.