Another Master of the Obvious

Just before I left grad. school lab, a new manager was hired. While this person was very nice, they were also very annoying due to the loads of useless and obvious information they tried to impart on me and other members of the lab. For those reasons I dubbed him Captain Obvious (If you like, you can read about Capt. Obvious here and here.)
In my new lab, I found no one obsessed with imparting the obvious and this made me happy. Unfortunately, I was knocked down a peg or two when I found a new specimen in journal club. She attends every week and as you might imagine, she finds many obvious things to point out. Since this person is actually a tenure-track faculty member (sigh), I will refer to her as Dr. Obvious.
After many journal clubs, I’ve noticed Dr. Obvious pretty much sticks to the basic tactics of imparting the obvious, but she also adds her own little flair to the process. I’ve also noticed that unlike most maters of the obvious, Dr. Obvious really enjoys sucking up to other faculty. It’s nauseating.

1. Through out journal club, Dr. Obvious insists on speaking along with the presenter. Like when you know what someone is going to say and you say it with him or her. Only, since this is a presentation, I find it inappropriate and annoying. Also, since I think Dr. Obvious is inferior to every other faculty member in the department, I can only assume this "talking with the speaker" is some sad attempt at making sure that someone, anyone, realizes that they know something about science. Unfortunately, the whole room could have chimed in because we all know what the presenter is about to say in these instances. It’s called common knowledge. This goes on every week.
2. Dr. Obvious asks way too many questions. These questions are either (a) silly or (b) a thinly veiled attempt to discuss her lab’s research or (c) both. I started keeping track of the amount of time Dr. Obvious takes up in the hour-long journal club with her questions and I clocked her at 10-15 minutes. Guess how long journal club typically runs over. That's right, 15 minutes. When Dr. Obvious does not attend journal club, they end on time.
3. She coos and coos over the other faculty members when they present a paper for journal club, telling them how smart they are and how awesome their work is. (Note: The paper typically does not have anything to do with their research.) When she found out that one of the faculty members discovered a TLR, I thought she was going to offer to spawn his children. After the fourth or fifth, “Wow, I didn’t know you discovered TLR??, that is soooooooooo amazing,” even he seemed a little annoyed.
4. When Dr. Obvious isn't stating something obvious, she is demonstrating why she tends to stick to stating the obvious. This is best illustrated with an example. A few months ago a paper that detailed the phenotype of a particular knockout mouse was presented. In this case, the KO mouse exhibited a skin abnormality. Ten minutes after journal club was supposed to end and 10 stupid questions and comments later, she asks another question. After the speaker answers her, she proceeds to say, “Oh! I thought this paper was about Drosophila.” Drosophila? DROSOPHILA!

Today’s journal club was chock full of #1s and #4s. Today’s #4 went something like this: The speaker presented a paper on how a particular viral protein affects leukocyte trafficking. Ten minutes after journal club is SUPPOSED to be done she asks something like this: Since a virus can evade the host's immune system by producing proteins that interfere with signaling, and bacteria can make these types of proteins too, then how do antibiotics work or is this why they don't work?
Let me just say that if spontaneous human combustion were possible, it would have happened to me today. All I could do was burry my face in my hands and muffle the large sigh and eye rolling that spontaneously occurs when I hear something that ridiculous.

Captain Obvious Saves Lab Meeting

In my current lab (one week to go) our group meeting is a weekly event, where a lab member presents their data and a paper. Typically, the paper centers around our favorite bacterium and is sent around to other lab members no later than two days prior to the meeting.
Captain Obvious (CO) led the most recent lab meeting. If the fact that CO was giving the meeting was not enough to tell me that the meeting was going to be hellish, the email alerting us to the "lab meeting paper" confirmed what was in store.
Obviously the point of the lab meeting paper email is to alert everyone to the paper choice. Usually the body of the email ranges from no text to a sentence fragment, unless you are Capt. O. CO (whose time in the lab spans many lab meetings and emails) sends us an email with a rather detailed explanation of why he is choosing multiple papers followed by bullet points of what his lab meeting will encompass. My eyes nearly rolled out of my sockets upon seeing the volume of text. A quick read confirmed that indeed, lab meeting would suck out loud.

The lab meeting went as follows.

1. Lab meeting paper preamble explaining why instead of choosing a timely paper from our field, he chose to present data from multiple papers, the most recent of which was published in 2007.
2. The history of the organism our lab studies. During this time CO looks proud at the information he has imparted on us silly individuals who know nothing about the organism we study. (I'm already repressing the urge to sigh loudly at this point.)
3. The paper(s) presentation, consisting of a list of strain-typing techniques, a map and dendogram. Again, good thing he pointed out all that old information that we didn't already know about. (I'm shifting in my seat and starting to sigh, but not in a loud and prolonged way.)
4. The presentation of Capt. O's data.
   I assume this was supposed to include results from two odd strains in comparison to results obtained from prototypical strains. Unfortunately, I am only aware of CO pointing out information regarding the other strains.
5. Western blots...for what purpose, I'm not sure. One of the blots featured protein taken from cells that were in lag phase for about 5hrs. I'm not sure how he compared these samples to samples taken from exponential or stationary phase from other growth curves because I got up and left since "I needed to stop my gel."
6. Lab meeting eventually ends. Fortunately the room was reserved and people needed us to get out so that they could use it. This prevented any outburst from me.

And that completes that tale of my last lab meeting as a member of graduate school lab.

Captain Obvious to the rescue

Our lab recently acquired a new manager, who up until recently was research faculty in another lab in my department. During the 8+ years spent in the previous lab, he published several papers, but none of them were first author, a curious tidbit of information that my PI and I discussed quite a bit. It wasn't a deal breaker for the lab manager job, which largely consists of ordering, managing the undergrad that makes media and sterilizes lab supplies and research odds and ends, but we were curious as to the reason.
Since this new lab manager started, the reasons for this authorship issue is becoming somewhat clear. First of all, everything that comes out of his mouth is a well-established fact presented as a novel connection that he just discovered. Some examples of this include statements like: "Microarrays cost much less than they used to" and "Instead of remelting your agarose or storing it in the water bath, you can pour all of it at once." (This is the equivalent of stating that computers are faster than they were 10 years ago or one box of cake batter could make one big cake, two round cakes or multiple cup cakes.) Because of statements like these, I impart on him the pseudonym, Captain Obvious.
On the one occasion, since he started in the lab, that Capt. Obvious informed me of something new and potentially interesting, he ended up scurrying away from me after I asked him a few questions about it. Sure, I was a little short with him, but telling someone that they must not be working because they are on their computer, is not a great way to get help. Anyway. He showed me a schematic he created from an alignment of several sequences obtained from different strain backgrounds. Interestingly, he identified several inversions and rearrangements that our lab was unaware of. After Capt. O forced me to look at these alignments I asked him what he thought about them. Which genes are inverted? What do the flanking regions look like? Have you looked at papers X, Y or Z? The answers were "don't know" to all of them, followed by a shrug. So, I asked if he planned on finding any of the answers to these questions. His response was a nervous laugh and a look of indifference. I felt like I was in the middle of third grade show-and-tell.
This annoys the crap out of me. First of all, even if I was playing on the internet, don't interrupt me with data that you are uninterested in pursuing. You don't need to justify your time in the lab to me. Actually, if that is what you are doing, then exhibiting a complete lack of thoughtfulness about the information that you presented makes finding the data seem like a waste of time. Making sterile tips or LB would assist my research, not random sequence alignments.
I am starting to see why Capt. O was unable to produce a first author paper in almost a decade. Capt. O does possess good technical skills and is well versed in statements of fact, but he is limited in his abilities to plan out experiments and generate a hypothesis.