Back from a business trip

A few of us in the lab had to go up to New York for work. We had hoped that the new guy we hired to take over this project would be able to take over the whole project. Instead we have the horrible situation occurring where the boss and I have to hold his hand through the whole project and in the end, we spend (ie waste) more time trying to keep an eye on him than we did before we hired him. He is clueless, has no initiative and is rather spaced out most of the time. It took three tries before he had a half way decent working protocol that we could follow. We found out over the course of our experimental run that there were mistakes, typos and errors in the protocol. On top of that, even after the boss asked him to add space for comments and notes, there wasn't enough space. It is a good thing he attached a few sheets of blank paper to the back of the protocol. But in the end, if he had planned out the protocol design more carefully, we wouldn't have needed the blank sheets.

Since we were working both with mice and cells, this was going to be a tough run, and it was. We arrived Sunday afternoon and did as much set up and labelling as we could in preparation for a Monday morning run. On Monday, I ended up getting a phone call from the clueless one asking why I didn't tell him to pick up his badge. Apparently they move things like that when offices start to open, so if he had picked it up when he was in the building earlier rather than waiting, he wouldn't have had to hike across campus to get it. I pointed out that not only did I not know they would move such items, but he could have walked back over and asked for a lift rather than make everyone late for our initial training and dry run. We have to put up with this guy for another 4-6 months. I am hoping he finds another job and just leaves.