Fifty ways to leave your lab

 

"...Oh, you hop on the bus, Gus
You don't need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free
Slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan..."

As I headed across campus to the main library this morning to pick up a book I had ordered from interlibrary loan, Simon and Garfunkel's Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover started playing. (Is this an improvement over Cecilia? Not sure.) Midstream, "..you don't need to discuss much, just drop off the key, Lee..."

In the summer of 1986, I opened the door to my assigned research space, next door to my office. My department chair was with me, the task was to see what  needed to be done to make the space usable for computational chemistry research. My predecessor had been gone for more than a year, so the space had become...storage...disarrayed...ugh, a mess. 

There was an old tire on one of the lab benches, and a dead pigeon on the window sill. Two window air conditioners were wedged with plywood into the windows, wheezing as they tried to keep up with the midsummer heat. We stood in the doorway and surveyed the scene. My chair said, "I will take care of it." He cleared the lab out — tire, dead pigeon and all — with his own hands. The space got kitted out with all the modern necessities for mid-80s' computational chemistry. Phone lines and modems to dial into the VAX computer up the hill. FORTRAN manuals. A couple of Mac Plusses which doubled as terminals. Racks to store magnetic tapes.  Tables. Chalk.

Over the last 40 years I have had several labs, this last one tucked into the round floor of the biology wing. And this is — was — the last lab. 

Last week I recycled the few hard copy manuals that remained. Gifted a nice large monitor to a young colleague who does some computational work. Recycled boxes of paper files, drafts of papers long ago published, data from projects that didn't quite bear fruit. CDs of software I will never need again were pitched in the trash. And a desk was piled with tech to be picked up by our IT folk. Including a 1986 Toshiba laptop, that was the computer I started my work on. I packed a couple of boxes to take home, but most everything else went into the trash.

I left no old tires, nor dead pigeons. I dropped off the keys, slipped out the back, and was free.

There must be 50 ways to leave your laboratory. 

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I am moving to part-time teaching beginning next fall, then retiring all together at the end of next academic year. This was the first major step toward that transition.