The End Of The Piers Show.

I’ve been waiting a long time to use that pun as post title; in an ideal world I’d have used it 21 months ago. But that time I’d disappeared from left the group one Wednesday night in circumstances which were, erm, unusual,* and I’d had enough morphine through my bloodstream to stun an elephant. It made for quite a hallucinatory couple of days, in which I think my grasp of the English language might have gone off at a very interesting tangent if I'd written this post then. No such worries this time which is good; I wouldn’t be terribly chuffed at having to pay $350 for another ambulance ride….

So I’m leaving again. The future is quite uncertain at the moment, since the local job market for 35-year-old PhD graduates in chemistry with no industrial experience is a bit, er, thin. Particularly when it seems the local chemical industry by-and-large wants people with Bachelors degrees only, and applications to those jobs aren’t taken seriously. Chemistry PhDs are a pyramid scheme? Maybe. Though I think viewing that aspect through the prism of the present situation isn’t the best.

Moving overseas was potentially a huge shock to the system. It was a whirlwind six weeks making arrangements to pack my life into two suitcases, having taken a chance at Christmas 2007 of wanting a change of scenery, despite another potential couple of years tenure in my old job if I wanted it. A set of speculative emails one January morning would result in a telephone interview within a couple of days and well inside of a week, the wheels were set in motion for moving 4400 miles. The nine-and-a-half hour flight over here went in a flash. There was a lot to be preoccupied with; it’d be fair to say that of my friends from grad school in Leeds, those who came to North America had uneven experiences taken as a whole. It'd be fair to say that those that had good labmates and boss had a great time, and that those that didn't, didn't.

Fortunately, it became apparent right from the off that my labmates for the next five years (notwithstanding the nine month interregnum caused by the clown-shoes buffoon that runs this country’s immigration system) were, as we’d say in the UK “good eggs”. We were in the pub by 5pm on the first Friday and that's always a good sign. From moving and trips to IKEA, introducing me to the Ship and Anchor, to years later visiting and fetching me from hospital, and doing the grocery shopping while I was confined to the Beige Towers sofa for two months, acclimatisation couldn’t have gone better. 

As it’s almost exactly five years since I moved here, I’ve got a good handle on things that are done better here and worse. For every bad thing (the strange obsession of serving coleslaw with fish and chips, the obscene price of cheese), there’s good thing like the summer weather or inveterate politeness. One of such example that I noticed within a few weeks of getting here, is that as a rule in a North American university you’re actually allowed to do your final PhD talk when the work is done, and not at some arbitrary date at the end of three years, whether you’ve finished or not as is the case in the UK. The first two or three talks I saw here from this lab saw pretty much everyone the candidate ever worked with acknowledged, so in that fashion, to you all from either SA029 or EEEL539, in roughly chronological order, thanks for making everything such a positive experience: Mike Bosdet, Josh Smith, Dawn Friesen, Alyson Kenward, Kent Greep, John Berezinski, Shunsuke Furukawa, Lena Park, Edwin van der Eide, Thomas Wood, James Laszlo, Cheng Fan, Tom Taylor, Korey Conroy, Erin Leitao, Tom Rogers, Catherine Bonnier, Jay Dutton, Annika Stute, Lauren Mercier, Terry Chu, Andreas Berkefeld, Adam Marwitz, Susie Riegel, Graham Tait, Matt Sloan, Matt Morgan, Juan Araneda, Rich Burford, Francis Leblanc, Tracy Lohr, Adrian Houghton, Andrey Khalimon, Dmitry Gutsulyak, Benedikt Neue, Bryan Shaw, Lauren Doyle, Fred Chiu, Anjan Mahrok, Oleksandra Trofymchuk, Mike Sgro and Javier Borau Garcia;

And last of all, of course, thanks to Warren Piers for being the first to reply to that speculative email one morning in early January 2008, and for the opportunity to come and work in your lab. I didn't really expect a reply within about three hours at 7am MT but it wouldn't be the last time either. Moving here pretty quickly took life in a direction I didn’t foresee at the time; I didn't intend to stay for good but came around to that idea within a few months. I must admit though, seeing your head peering round the curtain in Rockyview Hospital when I was coming round from a general anaesthetic was more than a bit weird. “WTF”, even.

You are all - in the nicest possible way - a formidable bunch of people whom I learnt an awful lot from both in terms of science and outside interests (enough even to take your hockey pool money once) and I wish you well in your future endeavours. If I’ve forgotten anyone, I apologise in advance, but that’s the result of one too many shots hitting me on the head playing soccer on a Wednesday.

* The moral of the story: be unsportsmanlike, take your teammates' offer of playing up front, antagonise the goalie at the other end, potentially cost your team some Spirit Points, but have two functional legs at the end of the night.