Dealing with that guy in the lab

Every research group has at least one of those.  You know, that guy.  When he opens his mouth, no one understands him.  When he passes by the hallway, the technicians will whisper the damages he caused last week.  When he bring stuff in the lab, they look like booby traps.  And on the rare occasion when he finally gets to do work, the safety officer will come and shut it down.  He is bad news, but he doesn't seem to know that himself.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I started my lab internship.  I took an office occupied by a grad student, let's call him Steve, who left a week ago, seemingly in a hurry, judging from the clutter still on his desk.  A few weeks later, my boss told me Steve's story.  He came to study about 2 years ago.  Back then he didn't speak much English, so he failed his comprehensive exam.  As his English improved, it was getting very clear that he had no formal education.  It turned out Steve was a farmer, and he forged his papers so that he could get a student visa, because it was easier than getting a work visa.  I ran into Steve when he came back to picked up his stuff.  Apparently he became a taxi driver in another city.

Here is another one.  Let's call this guy Yeti.  He was easy to spot because you can smell him from a distance away.  He's the kind of guy who does the wrong thing at the wrong place at the wrong time at your expense.  He once asked me about my recent run-in with one of the other grad students, just when I was talking to that other student in question.  During a talk he asked the speaker about his son's recent coming out. Another famous stint involved Yeti replacing his colleague's name with his on a paper and published it in secret.  A slap on the wrist was all he got.  No one knew what else he did, but when he was finishing up, he got a lot of job offers and awards based on his "groundbreaking" work.  For a slap on the wrist it was a pretty good bargain.

When I started grad school (a long time ago) there was this Egyptian PhD student, let's call him Ali.  Ali was a laid back but brilliant student, and I learned a lot from him.  Out of good humor, he often refer to his wheeled, portable test rig as his "car bomb".  But something changed near the end.  He scored a shrubberry of a beard while he was writing his thesis, and became very strict with his religious regimens.  Then he disappeared three months before his defense.  His Muslim colleagues told me Ali had left to join the Taliban.  His car bomb is still on proud display in the lab.

A few years later I had the pleasure to work with this new student, let's call him Tuck.  Tuck got this name because he looked like Friar Tuck and spoke like Donald Duck.  Whenever he appeared, office items from our desks would gravitate towards his area.  Then hazardous chemicals started showing up on his desk, next to ours, in open containers.  A word from the safety officer didn't change things much.  He eventually moved office, taking all the chemicals with him.  When he came back two years later to pick up his stuff, his computer was taken apart, and the only thing left was the case.  Obvious angry, he called the police but they never showed up.  Consider it frontier justice.

Jogging memory again, a postdoc this time, let's call him Moe.  While he was with us, strange maladies would inflict upon our lab equipment.  When Moe asked me to fix them, it was pretty clear whodunit.  Once crunch time came along, he needed 30 copies of a 200-page annual report in a hurry, with colors and all.  He somehow thought it'd be cheaper to print them all in-house.  Half way through printing he'd spot some typos and whatnot and the whole print job would start over a few times.  Moe finally got his 30 copies after a week or so, but all the lab printers were damaged from overheating.  Back in the days when laser printers cost $1500 apiece, and color ink jets about half that, Dropping $500 at Kinko's didn't seem like a bad idea anymore.  But, hey, he didn't have to pay for the damage because, according to him, the printers, toners, ink cartridges, and paper were just "public properties".

Perhaps this one is the craziest I have seen.  Let's name this guy Bluto, another postdoc.  He's a older, stocky guy who showed up one day without notice.  No hi, no nothing.  He kept to himself, but in spite of that everyone seemed to mind.  That's probably because he kept gawking at a female colleague in the lab, let's call her Olive.  The fact that she was engaged to ... uh ... Popeye ... was no nevermind to him.  Passion overruled reason one day, and a fight broke out between Bluto and Popeye over Olive in the lab, and my friend Wimpy intervened before it got out of hand.  A couple police officers came to the lab the next day to investigate. Apparently Bluto reported an assault on him from Popeye after the incident.  Neither of them was there so Wimpy set the record straight.  We never saw or heard from Bluto since, nor the cops.  Popeye and Olive lived happily thereafter.