The job is so glamorous I could kill myself with glee

I kinda miss working in a university lab. The vibe there is much different than in my current institution. Essentially, this comes down to value of the product (i.e., publications) rather than the how the product comes about.

The university lab was great. At the time, I was doing a lot of molecular biology shiz, which of course involved lots of cloning and such. This process doesn't involve a lot of babysitting, since it's essentially just growing bacteria, so I didn't have to be around for the whole day - and I wasn't. This was awesome. I was working on experiments while drinking beer at a bar in the afternoon. It didn't matter that I wasn't there physically. What mattered was that I was progressing toward publishing my work.

My current place of employment is not as such. I am supposed to be here, working, eight hours a day. I'm still a student, but this doesn't matter. Eight hours. Bleh. There are some days when I'm rarely at the bench but I'm stuck here anyway. It can be torturous. Whereas I would goof off sometimes at the university but then make it up on the weekends, I simply cannot do that here. If I say I'm coming in on the weekends, I get strange looks and the postdocs suggest that I just wait until Monday. Here, it's timecard over product, and it's stupid. Stupid, stupid.

What do I do with this time? When I'm being good, I check out PubMed for the latest and greatest. However, since I regularly check about thirty journals via RSS on a near daily basis, this doesn't really take a lot of time. It is then that I turn to the internet and soil my brain with stupid crap. I read lots of blogs, since they change often enough to keep me sane. I chat on Gmail. I send text messages to friends. It's such an exciting life.

I often wonder how scientists did science before computers and the internet. Seriously. Did they just get more done? I mean, there are some people who come in to the lab and spend about an hour checking email before they even get to the bench. Depending on the day, I can be one of those people. But really, were scientists in the days of yore that much more efficient, or did they eventually even up the time difference by having to walk to the library and physically search for articles? I'd like to know.

Whenever I see pictures of scientists in the 50's, they're always hanging out in the hallways smoking cigarettes and pipes. Maybe it's as simple as that. If it is, then downtime in the lab has never been good for our health or sanity.