I don't want to jinx it

Mom has mentioned (complained? chided?) before that I only blog about BAD stuff at work. That given what I've written, everyone would have to assume my boss is a jerk, my project is running on a treadmill of futility and my career prospects are limited to hoping Matt gets another promotion. There is a very un-scientific reason for this- when things are going well, I don't want to jinx it.

Part of this comes from developing a working style when I wasn't a very good scientist. In the early days, at the first sign of a cool result I'd run around and tell everyone how awesome this would look on the cover of Science. Only to have to eat my words at lab meeting when I figured out that I set up my experiments wrong. I'm not masochistic enough to put myself through the disappointment multiplied by embarrassment anymore, so I prefer to avoid talking about experiments that are still "in progress" - which for me, means they haven't reconfirmed and passed all the controls. Since my results don't really have to co-ordinate with anyone else, I can keep my hopes and failures quiet until I know what to do with them.

The other part is pseudo-scientific. I spent a good part of my first couple years here optimizing protocols. I'd start with some vague protocol like "mix stuff together, get good results" and have to parse every word for a variety of conditions. Mix by stirring or shaking? Does the order of the stuff matter? When do these good results come? I try to be detailed and notice external factors during my optimization. I end up with protocols that look silly, "start by stirring water alone 10 min, then slowly adding remaining stuff, waiting 5 min between each stuff. LEAVE LAB for 1 hour (preferably Indian buffet, NOT fish sandwich), before looking for results." Obviously, it's very superstitious. We call it voodoo- mostly because there's no logical explanation for why, but you have to go through voodoo steps otherwise the real science ones don't seem to work.

One of the unwritten voodoo steps on all my protocols is "don't believe it will work." This is like the running TopGear Challenge joke, the answer to "How hard could that be?" is always much harder than you imagined. Heaven forbid I ever think an experiment would work the first time- that is when the new undergrad never rinsed the soap out of the glass ware, or a fire drill occurred at a sensitive time point, or I'll run out of my key reagent... things find a way to go wrong.

This is actually something that has really started to wear on me. There are no Cartwheel Awesome moment in science. Well, there are maybe once a decade- perhaps more often if you are my boss. We are trained to be so skeptical that we can't take a good result at face value the first time we see it, and by the time it reconfirms in two other assays- well, the thrill is gone. Bad news, though, bad news you can get all at once- and all the time. These you can blog about with impunity- on the off chance you are wrong about how bad it might be, it will still have ruined your day/week. My next job is going to have more highs, and fewer lows. Or, at least I hope it might. I don't want to jinx it.