Before I started freelancing, I worked staff jobs. Each staff job required an interview, of course.

I have to admit that for each successful job interview I have had, I’ve had about five unsuccessful ones. Most of these were not my fault; another candidate was more skilled or had more experience. However, I have had a few disastrous interviews over the years which taught me valuable lessons. Let us review.

Never wear a Mickey Mouse watch to an interview (or one bearing the image of any cartoon character, for that matter). There was one incident in which my fancy, formal Swiss watch which I normally wear to interviews had a dead battery, and I absolutely had to know the time, so I donned the only other watch I owned—my Mickey Mouse watch, hoping that the interviewer would not notice. I hoped against hope. The interviewer said, “I find it interesting that someone would wear a Mickey Mouse watch to an interview.”

I replied, “My other watch has a dead battery, and I absolutely have to know what time it is. Punctuality is very important to me.” This was the truth, but he didn’t buy that.

Turn off the ringer on your cell phone. I failed to do this only once in my life and—you guessed it—my phone rang during the interview. At least I did not answer it.

Never second-guess the driving directions that you printed out (this applied in the days before GPS). I once had an interview in an unfamiliar area, and to be prepared, I mapped out and printed out driving directions from my home to the job location. For some reason, I second-guessed them—and got terribly lost. I had to call the location and tell them I could not make it because I could not find them.

Never try to squeeze your body into an interview suit that is some five years old (or older). This is self-explanatory.

What advice do you have for not being embarrassed at an interview?

I don’t often talk about my own successes, but I really should do so more often.

Last year, in November and December, I edited two catalogs for an outdoor furniture company for which a friend of mine does ecommerce. The catalogs were printed this past March and were a rousing success. I’ve been told that sales are doing very well this quarter.

I don’t want to be conceited, but I like to think I had a hand in it.

I used Adobe Acrobat to edit the catalogs and became more skilled in its use.

One of the catalogs I edited was the retail catalog. It is meant to market the furniture to individual consumers who live in homes. At 119 pages, it is full of beautiful photos of the furniture pieces. The photos are captioned with the names and prices of each piece, and the captioning was where I came in.

I was given a master Excel spreadsheet showing the price of each furniture piece; the spreadsheet was thousands of lines long. I looked up the price of each piece by searching for its name in the Search feature and made sure that the price on the spreadsheet was the same as the price given in the catalog. If they differed, I called it out by making a comment on the catalog page. The spreadsheet, like the customer, was always right.

I was also responsible for making sure there were no typos in the text boxes or the product names. Typos make things look very unprofessional.

The other catalog on which I worked was the trade catalog, and it is meant to market the furniture to institutions, such as colleges, hospitals, and restaurants. It features pieces like benches, café tables, and armchairs. Like the retail catalog, it is 119 pages long and filled with gorgeous photos. Unlike the retail catalog, it also contains diagrams for each furniture piece which show its dimensions in inches.

To edit the trade catalog, I used the company’s website. I made sure that the dimensions given in the catalog matched the dimensions on the website, and verified each SKU number (or item number). Again, I also edited the grammar, spelling, and punctuation in the text boxes and product names.

I wish I could display the catalogs on my blog and on LinkedIn.

Before editing science, I worked in academic scientific laboratories. I did so for about eight years (not including my graduate studies).

While I learned many techniques and constructive behaviors from my fellow technicians, postdocs, and supervisors, I also learned some actions to avoid from some of them (yes, I have actually observed most of the following offenses made by professional lab staff). If you work in a scientific laboratory or plan to in the future, you may wish to take note of these so that you do not put yourself in a dangerous or inappropriate situation.

Never eat, drink, or chew gum in a lab. This is an obvious one. If you put something in your mouth, you are most likely ingesting something that has been contaminated with chemicals, bacteria, or something worse. Imagine ingesting phenol, methanol, or E. coli. That is what you risk if you do this.

Never wear sandals or flip-flops in a lab. Things often get dripped and spilled on the floor during procedures, and you don’t want caustic or biohazardous solutions on your feet. Even worse would be if you were holding a cryostat blade, for example, and dropped that on your foot. Save that footwear for the beach or pool.

Never do your taxes at your desk in a lab. This is just plain inappropriate. Set aside time to do them at home. I don’t care if it is April 14^th. If it is that late, shame on you.

Never play on your phone at your desk in a lab. People will believe you are not serious about your work if you do. It’s better to keep your phone in a drawer in your desk (crack the drawer open a bit so you can hear the phone ring).

And finally…

If you must smoke or vape, go outside to a designated area. Don’t even think of lighting a cigarette with all of the flammable chemicals that are used and stored in a lab.

If you have worked in labs, what other “no-no’s” can you think of?

We hear a lot of talk about diversity in STEM these days and about how we need to have more of it.

I couldn’t agree more.

Racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in science and math fields, and we need to do more to include them. However…

…there exists another minority that is underrepresented in STEM. I’m talking about people with physical disabilities. (Those with other kinds of disabilities are affected by this exclusion as well, but for the purposes of this post, I will focus on physical disabilities.)

I have mild, although real and diagnosed, cerebral palsy (CP), which affects the coordination in my small muscles, as well as my walking. This has undoubtedly affected my performance in the biological research laboratory. To wit…

I was bullied repeatedly and ultimately fired from a job in an academic research lab where my CP would not allow me to put together small devices and manipulate tiny tubes in order to perform a crucial experiment. My CP also impeded my ability to prepare and isolate plasmid DNA. “We only have a year and a half left on our grant. Do you want a job in a year and a half?” I was told, proving that in some labs, the grants are infinitely more important than the employees.

I later had a position in a lab at a different institution in which I had to work with live mice. This work included restraining the mice and snipping off the ends of their tails with special scissors (yes, cruelty is the norm in some undertakings). Once again, my CP did not allow my hands to cooperate no matter how hard I tried, and I was fired from this job as well. My principal investigator cited my lack of dexterity as one of the main reasons for my dismissal.

I never worked in an industry lab. I took a few courses at the local community college which taught how to do cell culture, chromatography, and other procedures important to the industry. Although I did well on the exams, my lab performance was of concern to the instructor, who believed that I worked too slowly. And my instructor was right.

Is anyone willing to make a reasonable accommodation for a worker who needs to be more deliberate and careful in their work in order to do a good job?

If you have a physical disability and work in STEM, please let me hear from you. Are you being treated fairly?

Last week this blog focused on those who keep live animals in their workplace offices. If doing so helps you work more efficiently, I say go for it.

If I kept live animals in my workspace, I personally would find them distracting—even an aquarium full of fish swimming about. However, I do not want my office space to be sterile and devoid of life (or anything that resembles life), either.

This is why I have stuffed animals in my office space.

I do not have a whole menagerie similar to what a little girl might have in her bedroom. I only have three stuffed animals at the moment. Please allow me to introduce you to each of them.

First, there is the Maryland Quarter Bear. For those of you unfamiliar with Quarter Bears, they came out around the turn of the millennium, when the 50 state quarters were being minted and distributed. Each little teddy bear represents a U.S. state, is a different color, and has a little pocket for holding the quarter that represents its state. Since I was born, was raised, and currently live in Maryland, I purchased the Maryland bear decades ago and inserted a Maryland quarter, with the State House design visible, into its pocket. It is fuzzy, black in color, and has the iconic Maryland flag embroidered on its back. Looking at it gives me a sense of state pride.

Then there is Roary, who is a Beanie Baby lion. Remember the Beanie Baby craze of the 1990s? I did not rush out and buy all of them (some of them sold for outrageous prices), but I told myself that I had to have just one. I chose Roary because the lion is my favorite animal, and I paid a reasonable price for him. Sometimes I have to laugh at myself when I look at him because he reminds me of how I almost got sucked into the Beanie Baby fad (or perhaps I did get sucked into it).

Last, but not least, there is Garfield. Yes, as in the famous orange cat. He has been my favorite comic strip character since I was eight years old, and I collect all kinds of items with his likeness. (I even have a cloth Garfield mask, which was made for and worn during the COVID-19 pandemic.) The stuffed Garfield on my bookshelf wears a chef’s hat and an apron that reads, “I LOVE LASAGNA!” I obtained it in a Howard Johnson’s restaurant in Lake George, New York when I was about nine.

Do you have (or do you admit to having) stuffed animals in your workspace? What are they?

I am genuinely concerned for the members of one of my professional organizations right now. During the first week of April, they are having a conference in San Diego.

I am concerned because the state of California, including San Diego, has been pummeled with natural disasters lately. In the southern part of the state, there have been floods and mudslides. In the north, there was just this week a blizzard, and I cannot even recall what else has plagued this part of the Golden State in the last several months.

I want my colleagues to stay safe.

It seems to me that California used to be the state with perfect weather, no hurricanes, blizzards, torrential downpours, or floods. (I have always lived on the East Coast, so I can’t really say that; I am going by my impressions only.) Now they can’t catch a break. And on top of all of this, they sometimes have earthquakes. Earthquakes seem to be the worst natural disasters because you cannot predict when they will hit or evacuate ahead of time.

Forgive me now for saying something that is often considered political but is scientific: The climate is changing.

I have family in Québec, Canada who got along without air conditioning in their homes for decades. Many people in that area are now installing air conditioning, because it often gets brutally hot in the summer. One summer, the temperature in the Montreal area hit a scorching 98° F and the authorities were telling people without air conditioning (i.e., nearly everyone) to go to malls, libraries, public pools, and other cool places and not stay home. The community swimming pool in my aunt and uncle’s neighborhood was open until the wee hours so people could cool off instead of sweating in their beds.

In the Maryland city where I live, there is a large pond in a beautiful downtown park. At one end of the pond are the remains of a shelter for ice skaters. They are there for historic purposes only, because skating is now forbidden on the pond. This is because—you guessed it—the ice does not freeze hard enough to be safe for skating.

These are my observations. What are yours?