I’m getting minions next week though

Yesterday was bananas. The morning started out alright; I got a draft finished of a janky way to get region-specific covid benchmarks up. The lab meeting was a little unhinged; the PIs were half an hour late from a meeting with the university president that ran over, and only had thirty minutes to lay out a completely new timeline for the group. F, who we’ve been collaborating with on a data collection experiment, is rushing to take as much credit and as little risk as possible by early next week, and we’re going to try to have something more rigorous and rich to offer by 20 April as a sort of counter argument. So everybody’s existing priorities have been shaken down for loose change, and we’re running full-tilt at both the data we’re getting from F’s users and all the other data signals we’re hoping to include in our new tool. I spent the rest of the afternoon finishing up the public release of the crowdcast site and working on the F users survey data. First roadblock: CMU’s qualtrics license doesn’t include access to their API, so we have to download manually until that change request works it’s way through the bureaucracy. Okay; I switch over to the next stage of the pipeline. I take a quick meeting with R who replaces L with me as point of contact for data exchange on this project so L can focus on the statistical system. This is generally good because F is hella pushy and coping with that is not one of L’s strengths... but on the other hand if I don’t stop with this managing business I’m afraid they’ll just keep giving me power over things and I’m not sure I’m up for that, I really just want folks to make a fscking decision, do what they said they’d do, write things down, and communicate problems in a timely fashion, and welp I guess that’s management isn’t it. Next: F wants county-aggregated data ASAP, and we don’t have anybody on that, so I pick it up. I wound up working on that until... too late in the day for me, really, plus transition time to hand it off to L. Subsequent confusion about whether F wants counts or percents, and some anxiety about the percent-based HRR-aggregated data we already sent them before deciding to roll with it (F didn’t complain last time) and backtrack after delivery if needed. Finished around eight, then dinner, crossword, and sleep. I’ve already fielded a clarification question this morning from F, but I’m hoping they quickly get the picture that I am much more firm about boundaries than L was, and that sort of nonsense will trail off.