I love Gmail, but...

At 10:58pm, promptly when I sat down at my computer to take a break from invitation-making, a little Gmail chat box popped up on the screen from my PI, asking to send a file with some data I recently collected. The timing was so exact as to when I touched my laptop, it errily seems as though he was sitting there staring at the screen, waiting for my little dot to go from orange to green.

While waiting for my data to magically transfer to his computer via the internets, he stated:
"what did we do before little green dots and gmail chat??"

Is "not harass graduate students during their few precious hours outside of the lab" a valid answer to that question?


It's fantastic to have a PI who is so excited about data and who always wants to be involved in the lab (rather than the PIs of other labs, who never set foot in the lab and only wanted to hear about data at weekly meetings), but talking science and experiments late at night is not conducive to falling asleep, as once I re-start my brain and think about experiments, it takes a few hours to shut it back off. Looks like, just like the past few nights, I may as well just stay up another 3 or 4 hours and work on the invitations, rather than try to fall asleep and wind up having experiment nightmares.