Some days, I just have to wonder how much a first authorship is really worth. Due to circumstances I won't describe here, a new graduate student has been added as an author on a paper I've been trying to push out for the last year or so, ostensibly to help finish work on the validation data.
Unfortunately, this has not worked out quite as planned. Instead of expediting the writing process, this new co-author has required me to spend an inordinate amount of time having to explain things like (1) why probes targeting regions of the Y chromosome fail in females and (2) why I'm not going to spend my time re-uploading another 10-GB of data just because said co-author refuses to use sed to replace "NA"s with "Null"s.
Then, there was this recent conversation at 10pm on Saturday (edited for formatting):
Me: Didn't you have all of my old, original data at one point?
Student: Yes I did. And then I generated the [data] file and deleted them for space. But then I found a bug in my calculation so I don't want to use those [generated] files anymore.
Now, I realize that I had more than a few years of lab experience before coming back to graduate school, so I might have some unreasonably high expectations of other grad students. However, I don't think it's that unfair to expect even a first-year student to intuitively realize that deleting your original data files is a Very Bad Idea (TM).
In any case, I don't particularly feel like spending time this weekend writing a script to dig through ~400-GB of compressed tarballs to find the eight files in question, so I think my nice-ish way of saying "You deleted your original data?! Yeah, screw you; you're on your own. I'm going drinking with my friends." will have to do for now. Yet one more thing to add to my "To Do" list on Monday.
No comments:
Post a Comment