Chaos

Auugh, too many people around... The "lab" where I'm working is currently undergoing a mild to moderate mayhem, as all undergraduates with their graduate supervisors are trying to run their "experiments" before the term finishes. This means that I can no longer assume that the tablespace and network cable that I usually use as my "homebase" would be free. On the contrary, it is most likely taken over by an undergraduate eating some of the chocolate that was reserved as a reward for the participants for her experiments. There are papers and laptops everywhere, people coming and going, students giving instructions on how to respond to their behavioural experiments, how to fill in the questionnaires and so forth. Some others are debriefing their participants on why they made them listen to the same boring stimuli 35 600 times and trying to pretend that it doesn't matter if they responded '4' on a seven-point scale on every occasion, while inconspicuously trying to write "outlier - delete" on their notes.

I needed to evacuate to my "branch office" for most of the day, just to get something done. It's just too much to have all this commotion around while trying to think about how to process your data. I don't like open offices and it is especially difficult if someone is on "my" reserved space. But, the term ends this week and the mind-numbing peace will prevail again. I wonder how long it will take before I get bored with having no one around and start blaming quietness for not being able to work at optimal efficiency... :-)