It could be worse...

Typically, I can't stand it when someone dismisses my foul mood with the statement "It could be worse." But, no matter how much I dislike this weird version of a silver lining, I can't deny that it is true. (Of course, I suppose you can say "It could be worse" about any bad situation except terminal illness and death.) Just over a year and a half ago life handed me a fantastic example of how things could indeed, be worse.

The prelude to this lesson was the realization that my dissertation project was completely fucked. The person I inherited the project from messed up everything. EVERYTHING! I am NOT exaggerating, and just to prove it, I am going to provide a few examples of just how messed up it was.

1. We were working with an unsequenced organism and the locus we were studying was sequenced by my predecessor. The sequence was wrong. An examination of the records from our sequencing facility revealed that he only amplified and sequenced the locus one time.
2. He engineered his own plasmids, but placed the origin of replication into the multiple cloning site (MCS), resulting in bizarre and unreproducible expression of genes placed within MCS.
3. Strains labelled as single mutants were actually double mutants due to sloppy design of knock-out construct. (No wonder I couldn't complement them.)
4. Claimed expression levels of genes of interest were extremely low only to find out he didn't induce them.

Finally I realized that the only thing I could do to with the strains, plasmids, etc., was throw them in the trash, which I did. I went through every shade of mad possible and probably would have been arrested for assault if my predecessor hadn't moved to Singapore to wreak havoc in some other lab. I tried to move on and let it go, but I couldn't. This wasted over a year of my time and I was freaking pissed off. The fact that no one was here to pay for such sloppy work only added to my frustration. I started everything anew and things began to work, but that empty space I had on my shoulder was replaced with a little chip, that got bigger with any obstacle I ran into that I could trace back to the jack-ass before me.

A couple of months later I got an attitude adjustment by way of a friend who went from writing his dissertation to flying back to his home country without so much as a masters. This is what happened to him:
My friend, who I will call Carl, was working for a problematic PI. He had a hypothesis that he wanted Carl to prove, but all of Carl's data disproved the hypothesis. Carl's PI pushed him to repeat a certain experiments over and over, convinced that Carl was the problem, even though all the controls indicated otherwise. Eventually, Carl's PI tried to kick him out of school, citing that he was a poor student and was not dedicated to research. Fortunately, his committee disagreed and ultimately Carl was moved to a different project. (Yeah. Big red flag. You never set out to prove a hypothesis. You can only set out to test it.)
Carl's new project went smoothly and within a couple of years he produced enough data to write his dissertation. He also published a couple of first author papers and had another paper submitted (I think). Carl even interviewed for a great post-doc position at a somewhat prestigious lab and got it. Then all hell broke loose.
Before he could defend, his PI came under investigation by the NIH when he tried to publish a paper using a figure that was already published in another paper from his lab. This paper was not related to Carl's work and Carl was not on the paper. Everything from the lab was confiscated, including all computers and lab notebooks.
An examination of these things cleared Carl. All of his data was accounted for in his lab notebook and in logs from using equipment and core facilities at the institution. At this point, things seem like they are going to be OK for Carl. His data was deemed safe, he still had his kick-ass post-doc and he could continue writing his dissertation.
Unfortunately, the school decided not to let Carl defend his dissertation. The university would not even let him get a MS on the work that had been published previous to the debacle. Again, none of his work was related to the bad figure or paper. In the end, Carl spent six years in graduate school, got enough data to write a dissertation, but ended up with nothing to show for it.
As I watched all this unfold my project problems seemed seemed lame. At least I could salvage everything and none of the bad data from my predecessor ever made it into a manuscript. I was still going to get my PhD and I only wasted a year, not six. I flicked that chip off my shoulder and moved on. That doesn't mean I am not still pissed at the person who screwed up my project, but I don't dwell on it anymore, because it could obviously be a shit-load worse.