Design and implement

I popped my head into Big Boss Man's office this afternoon to comment quickly on an e-mail he had sent me about some equipment her on campus.  I knew I shouldn't have casually mentioned that I had heard back from one of the collaborator's from far away about a question we had about MFP (Big Boss Man is all about shooting off a quick e-mail rather than pouring through the stacks of literature if, as he puts it, we are collaborating and they use a chunk of our grant money). 

An hour and a half later, we have come up with a whole slew of new experiments that, if I do say so myself, are a fairly clever and extremely novel (no one, in the past 60 yrs of research on MFP have done this) way to get some hard-core answers.  While I am excited about these experiments and trying to get them to work, right now I am more excited in that I contributed a lot to not just the idea of doing these things, but also to their design and importance. 

While he and I "talked" our way through the ins-and outs, for one of the first times, I really felt like I was discussing things with my boss, rather than he telling me what to do.  Even when we were talking about what this would eventually tell us (both negative and positive results will tell us something), I could see where his reasoning was going and, like I said, helped put my spin on more than a few things.  I left feeling like this is one of those rare moments where we were on the same page.

I always leave his office with way more things to do than humanly possible, but today he made the comment about "Every time you come in here, I think of more things to do and this (these-since now its officially two papers) are going to turn into monsters..." Hahaha at least he realizes.....But tonight, I am going to enjoy the high and begin the nitty-gritty design and implementation tomorrow.