Via Kate, a story from a legal blog about a decisions in the case of a messy professor:
"Clean your room or get out!" Words from a frustrated parent to a messy teenager? Not quite. The mess-maker in this case was a chemistry professor at the University of Texas, who ignored repeated warnings to clean up his dangerously cluttered lab space. When University officials decided to clean it themselves, the professor caused such a disturbance that campus police had to lead him away in handcuffs. The professor was eventually fired, which prompted a lawsuit claiming that the University retaliated against him and denied him equal protection.
Now, I will admit that I once got an email from my postdoc advisor threatening to fire me if I didn't clean the lab, but that was a late-night fit of pique, and we smoothed it over in the morning. Still, even I can't really imagine what kind of mess this must've involved.
Anyway, here's the poll:
On a scale of one to ten, one being "we put the socket wrenches back in the tool chest for the two minutes between removing the old flange and installing the new one" and ten being, well, "led off in handcuffs for intefering with the campus officials cleaning your lab," how messy is your work space?
It depends on what I'm working on at any given time, but I'll give an average value of about 5. It's about a 2 on the best days, and a 7 on the worst, but 4-5 is fairly typical. Tools that I use often are generally lying out on the optical tables somewhere along with optics that have been removed or are waiting to be installed, and I'm pretty bad about picking up and throwing away discarded Post-Its, lens tissue, and odd bits of wire.
I'm nowhere near being arrested or fired, though.
My office is worse than my lab, most of the time. But I figure as long as it's cleaner than that of the campus safety officer, I'm safe, and that's not a high bar to clear, as it turns out.
- Log in to post comments
My office is probably a 5 or 6, what with the stacks of papers in different places. I tend to let it slide until the clutter reaches a point where it interferes with my work, at which point I become an archeologist for a day and excavate my desk. ;)
Well, since my "lab" is a Linux cluster, decide for yourself
by clicking here
My desk is a 7 or so. All i do here is look at NMRs (which are neatly piled), store ibuprofen, and drink coffee, so most of the clutter is coffee, lunch, or pill bottle related.
Lab on the other hand.....Good days my bench is a 3, bad days it's an 8. Average days a solid 5 - i hate opening drawers so i keep most things in bins on benchtop.
Hood rarely sinks below a 4. There's just too much going on. When i go on vacation i can get it to a 2. Most days its 6-7 during the day and 5 at night. Once a month or so it rises to an 8.
Ebb and flow, you know.
My desk is a probable 6-7. Mostlly piles of unread magazines and pieces and parts of projects being worked on. I have just enough room for my keyboard and coffee cup. Bob Pease of National Semiconductor fame wrote a good piece on cleanliness, it can be found here...
http://tinyurl.com/2dfqfe
Mine is about a three, functionally messy, but definitely organized overall. But that's just my part of the lab, the entire thing probably gets around a 7, to my annoyance.
6 to 7 at good times but can easily degenerate to 11!
Many years ago one of our profs had an extraordinarily messy office. You literally had to tiptoe in to get past the stacks and piles to his desk. One weekend night an extension cord shorted out and started a fire. It was an old building, built unusually solid, and the fire eventually burned itself out in his office. It just ran out of oxygen.
We have moved into a beautiful modern building and his office is still an amazing mess. But now we have forced-air ventilation. I keep my fingers crossed.
Lab space: a solid 2, but only because I'm forced to be thus by the university animal committee :). Non-animal lab space, maybe a 4. Office slides from 2 down to about 8 until my (always-1) officemate gets too irate and starts organising me, which is so horrendous that I self-defend by tidying!
I put everything back in its place when I'm done for the day, but while I'm working I create my own little world of clutter that nobody but I can appreciate. Not sure where that fits on the number scale, but probably fairly decemt.
Desk space: 7 (horribly cluttered & disorganized, but nothing life-threatening or unsanitary)
Lab space: 3 (I am diligent about keeping all my tools and materials put away, because if I don't, somebody will pick them up and walk off with them.)
On a good day, I can see enough of my desk to put a cup of water on it.
I REALLY need to clean my office. I thought about doing it today, since I'm bored, but that's too much like actual work.
When I had a lab, I oscillated between 3 and 4.
My desk, currently, is a 9+.
The desk and office get neat either at the end of a semester (so I can start fresh) or when I turn to organizing as a way to put off doing some pressing task that I really don't want to do.
Office: Typically hovers somewhere in the 5 through 8 region, currently near a low ebb since I am coming to the end of a two year project. I only throw stuff out at the end of a project. Except food and eating implements which are disposed of daily.
Lab: I'd say somewhere in the range of 8 to 10, with the 10 being given mainly because I've had "discussions" verging on raised-voice-exchanges with managers and other petty bureaucrats who somehow have the mistaken notion that anyone in the world is impressed by a clean lab.
"We have visitors coming in! This place needs to be clean!" "No, we have visitors coming in and I have real work to do. Get out." I will also yell at managers who take it upon themselves to move my cheese. I have done so in the past and I will do so in the future.
So call it a 9.5 based on attitude alone.
"Mess" is not like Mass. It is subjective, not properly quantified without extensive description of axioms, assumptions, instrumentation, calibrations.
When I have a lab or office, I notice an oscillatory phenomenon, with books and documents from home piling up at work, and then being forced back home by external constraints.
In one case, I'd leased a 2-room office for one of my spin-off businesses. A PhD colleague, caught in a nasty divorce, begged me to upgrade to a larger office, that he would share. So I got a multi-year lease on a 3-room office. Then the colleague remarried, defaulted on his share of the office rent, and I was evicted (and sued for the remainder of the lease payments).
The largest room in my home -- the big one with the main fireplace and windows to both front and back gardens, had "temporarily" piled stacks of boxes of book and papers. Temporarily, as it happened, meant years, which my Physics professor wife found extremely objectionable. So she bought an 8' x 8' x 16' shed built behind the garage to store said boxes.
Mess? I hold that books cannot be a mess, and that the half-million pages of paper were necessary documents for over a hundred research projects in progress. But we couldn't throw any big parties in the house, without that big room. Except the "shed-warming party" where guests, after being plied with food and drink, carried boxes to the shed.
My wife keeps her lab spotless, by the way. And not thanks to a lazy lab assistant, the previous lab assistant (and co-author with my wife in "The Physics Teacher") having quit when harassed by the plagiarist Chairman and alcoholic psychopath Dean. But that's another story.
Chad likes me to keep on-topic, without namedropping, and dislikes the personal ramblings. In this case, the two are inextricably entangled.
Boxes of book are heavy... oh, right, we did the lead bricks thread already.
Seems like a relevant quote (Richard Feynman in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!)
"...I walked down the end of the hall, went through the door, and in ten seconds I learned why Princeton was right for me--the best place for me to go to school. In this room there were wires strung all over the place! Switches were hanging from the wires, cooling water was dripping from the valves, the room was full of stuff, all out in the open. Tables piled with tools were everywhere; it was the most godawful mess you ever saw. The whole cyclotron was there in one room, and it was complete, absolute chaos! [...] I suddenly realized why Princeton was getting results. They were working with the instrument. They built the instrument; they knew where everything was, they knew how everything worked, there was no engineer involved, except maybe he was working there too. It was much smaller than the cyclotron at MIT, and "gold-plated"?--it was the exact opposite."
My space is anything but neat, not sure I could quantify it, though.
My desk is about a 6-7, our labs probably range anywhere from 3-8 at various times.
But I'll reiterate something I tell everyone: "A clean lab is a lab where nothing gets done."
I'm currently hovering right around an 8.
# 15: Love that Feynman quote!
Speaking of that, clean labs, and "gold-plated":
(a) a Grumman Aircraft Corporation engineer neighbor of mine in Brooklyn Heights, circa 1967, told me that as the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module) was being built, before they put on the gold foil wrapping, had gold solder for electrical connections, for electro-thermal purposes. The technicians doing the soldering were intentionally very sloppy in their work. At the end of the late shift, they'd sweep the floor, and smuggle home the cooled gold-rich droplets.
(b) When my wife was PI on a superconductor-insulator superlattice project, she and her co-researcher were using diamond substrates, before coating were ion-beam-sputtered on. Once, bumped by the door of the vacuum chamber, the other guy dropped the square centimeter of ultra-flat diamond. Many people crawled around on that lab floor, like a contact-lens hunt, but more serious. They never found it. I don't need to say that diamond is expensive, do I?
Which reminds me of the famous garbologist I heard interviewed a few years ago on NPR (or BBC?). His best find ever was a thrown-out diamond ring. Unfortunately, since he'd put it back in the container in which he'd found it, and on his messy desk, his cleaning lady threw it out again.
As a programmer, I don't really have a "lab", just my cubicle. And I keep it fairly neat. There are papers piled here and there, but even when things get bad the surface of my desk is visible here and there. Call it a solid, boring 4. Occasionally it may climb as high as 7, and sometimes I get inspired and clean up to a 2.
As a theoretician, my lab is my office. The mean and mode is 5, with spurts to 3 when the cleaning folks are eminent and I have to order stuff to avoid pattern destruction, and falling to 7 or so when I am in the throes of doing a paper or presentation.
My personal lab space is around a 3. I like everything in its place, and I dust regularly. The lab for the whole research group probably is a 6. It's hard to get people to throw away paper towels and rubber gloves.
I work in a cube farm in a big company. They move us around a lot. Compress cubicles. Decompress cubicles. Move this little group so another team can all sit together. About the only time I really clean up is when I am made to move. Well, I've been in the same cube for more than 3 years now, so the clutter is getting pretty obnoxious.
I am doing organic synthesis so I always struggle with piles of leftover mess - I often tend to push the stuff away until it becomes bothersome, taking too much space in the fume hood (or I run out of particular glasware) and then I really have to clean it up. The obsesive-compulsive trait helps. Also it is annoying to bump into piles and spill some stuff for lack of elbow room or losing truck of something as it got intermingled with old crap.
Some chemists are terrible - their space is completely filled with garbage from month-old experiments and if you happen to share bench or hood with such a person its a constant aggravation. My experience is that more succesful people tend to be more organised in their lab space.
Not cleaning the glassware right after the experiment is like not washing the dishes after the breakfest - the dried-on eggs become a lot harder to scrubb off in the evening.
By the way, having a spectacular spill (reaction mix shooting out of flask like a volcano), flooding the fume hood with water or cracking silicone oil heating bath is an excellent inducer for a clean-up. Silicone oil tends to cover things like a fungus and once you have to de-oil a pile f your glassware, you are less likely to pile it up again.
The standard in our organization is set by "letter from the Fire Marshall". That level was reached by 10% of our faculty last year, none of whom came close to one prof where I was a post doc. His collection of the Physical Review and Physics Today was simply tossed against the wall where it settled in at the natural angle of repose. There was a narrow trail between the hills to get to his office. Yet he could find what he needed in less than a minute!
What passes for lab space for me, the store room where lecture demo material is kept, is probably close to 2 or 3. Shelves are labeled and things go back as soon as they are used. The storage area for the laboratory is similarly organized, but that was done before I got there.
My office, on the other hand, varies from about a 5 to whatever you might rate the way it looked at the end of last semester:
http://doctorpion.blogspot.com/2007/05/clean-up-on-aisle-four.html
That must be at least a 7 or 8, but still well short of the Fire Marshall standard because the mess is limited to the desk top (not counting what it looks like inside the file cabinets).
6 to 7 at good times