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psocopteraSo when I left work (around 6:50) there was this guy in the hall sort of pacing back and forth in a "lost" way. I asked him what he was looking for, what room number, having recently been the wandering lost person myself, and he sort of muttered something about looking for his work and headed for the stairwell (I work on the 7th floor). This triggered my suspicion circuit and so I told the cop-office in the lobby about the encounter (in a "not a big deal but thought I would mention" sort of way).
And second-guessed myself all the way to the train station. Guy looked Middle Eastern or possibly Hispanic; accent, not the best English (or really serious mumbling problem); had I just sent the cops to harrass some innocent janitor (or worse, slightly confused postdoc) out of sheer racial bias? But, on the other hand, why would a genuinely confused person flee from someone trying to be helpful into the stairwell (when he hadn't been heading for the stairs before I spoke to him)? Am particularly primed to be suspicious after public-safety presentation at orientation about how people get stuff stolen off their desks all the time in my building...
And am possibly too bias-hypersensitive for my own good. Had odd conversation with PI; radio in lab was playing "Ode to Joy" and he said he'd heard something like 85% of the people in Japan know the lyrics in the original German, that choral music is really big in Japan. (No, actually what he said was that "the Japanese" really like choral music, but I shy away from this construction.) "Interesting," I said. He went on to speculate as to whether Yoshi (who is either a grad student or a postdoc, I'm not exactly sure, and who I listened to discuss his research entirely without comprehension for several minutes until I realized that what I was hearing as "serrhines" were "cell lines") knew the lyrics to "Ode to Joy". And I was instantly uncomfortable. "I don't think it works like that," I said nervously, and my PI was incredulous; "Come on," (pedantic manner), "How do probabilities work?" I hemmed and hawed and eventually said that I didn't think I was capable of applying group statistics to an individual any more ("because of, you know, people's sensitivities", I said, or something equally awkward and probably offensive in its own right). And it's true... the conditioning is so strong that just *thinking* about the fact that there is an 85% chance that had Yoshi been there he might have been thinking along to Ode to Joy in German makes me look around for the prejudice watchdogs. And this is ridiculous... I mean, I think knowing the Ode to Joy lyrics in German is an admirable thing! But, it's getting email after email from Brandeis about how they've hired another Diversity Coordinator and another Sensitivity Outreach Counsellor and this and that in response to totally overblown incidents... "I don't think it works like that."
(For the record, my PI doesn't share my weird liberal-university neuroses because he's from Costa Rica, or rather, I suspect that may be a factor in the difference in attitudes. ::grin:: Much of the lab is actually from various Latin American countries - someone from Colombia is joining in November and there's been joking about the "Spanish ghetto". It's making me want to brush up my Spanish so I can eavesdrop when people are talking....)
And second-guessed myself all the way to the train station. Guy looked Middle Eastern or possibly Hispanic; accent, not the best English (or really serious mumbling problem); had I just sent the cops to harrass some innocent janitor (or worse, slightly confused postdoc) out of sheer racial bias? But, on the other hand, why would a genuinely confused person flee from someone trying to be helpful into the stairwell (when he hadn't been heading for the stairs before I spoke to him)? Am particularly primed to be suspicious after public-safety presentation at orientation about how people get stuff stolen off their desks all the time in my building...
And am possibly too bias-hypersensitive for my own good. Had odd conversation with PI; radio in lab was playing "Ode to Joy" and he said he'd heard something like 85% of the people in Japan know the lyrics in the original German, that choral music is really big in Japan. (No, actually what he said was that "the Japanese" really like choral music, but I shy away from this construction.) "Interesting," I said. He went on to speculate as to whether Yoshi (who is either a grad student or a postdoc, I'm not exactly sure, and who I listened to discuss his research entirely without comprehension for several minutes until I realized that what I was hearing as "serrhines" were "cell lines") knew the lyrics to "Ode to Joy". And I was instantly uncomfortable. "I don't think it works like that," I said nervously, and my PI was incredulous; "Come on," (pedantic manner), "How do probabilities work?" I hemmed and hawed and eventually said that I didn't think I was capable of applying group statistics to an individual any more ("because of, you know, people's sensitivities", I said, or something equally awkward and probably offensive in its own right). And it's true... the conditioning is so strong that just *thinking* about the fact that there is an 85% chance that had Yoshi been there he might have been thinking along to Ode to Joy in German makes me look around for the prejudice watchdogs. And this is ridiculous... I mean, I think knowing the Ode to Joy lyrics in German is an admirable thing! But, it's getting email after email from Brandeis about how they've hired another Diversity Coordinator and another Sensitivity Outreach Counsellor and this and that in response to totally overblown incidents... "I don't think it works like that."
(For the record, my PI doesn't share my weird liberal-university neuroses because he's from Costa Rica, or rather, I suspect that may be a factor in the difference in attitudes. ::grin:: Much of the lab is actually from various Latin American countries - someone from Colombia is joining in November and there's been joking about the "Spanish ghetto". It's making me want to brush up my Spanish so I can eavesdrop when people are talking....)
