06 April - Work Assessment (Day 78)

My sup never appeared at 11am as promised to review my work. Hence I carried on typing my report until lunch. He did join us for lunch and said he would discuss with me on my work between 1pm to 2pm. The lunchtime party strength was the biggest ever, 9 in all. I asked Jaro how long he needs to drive all the way to Czech from France. He said non-stop; 15 hrs. But he would stop at the border of Germany and France to stay in a friend’s place. Besides talking to him, I didn’t talk to anyone else during lunch as they were speaking French as usual. Then my sup asked if I understood a single thing about what they were saying and I said zero. It had always been the case. He said that’s sad. Obviously he hadn’t had lunch with us for a long time.

After lunch, my sup came and we talked a bit on my tour before discussing work. I showed him the results from all the experiments and he said they were great as the results were consistent and there were some kind of pattern. There were some analysis of the data which he would like me to redo but overall I had completed the task of carrying out the experiments and collecting the data. The next thing to do was to call up a statistician who did the statistic analysis for his previous paper. We would explain to him the data and sent all those excel files that I had prepared to him. My sup said only he can say whether the results showed significant patterns or not after doing ANOVA analysis on them; finding the mean, standard deviation, etc. I told him that I had 5 more extra participants to rerun some of the experiments but he said we could only change a participant if we had a very strong reason to do so. We could add in the extra people but that would not be following the protocol of another experiment which we were comparing with. Hence, he told me to use them for experiment4. One more experiment for me. But I had more or less coded the exp and needed just some fine tuning. But I told him I had a participant coming at 2pm and with 5 min left, I couldn’t finish the exp in time. Then the participant came and my sup went to explain to him, asking him to return on Friday at 2pm. Later I also sent an email of apology to him.

My sup then looked at the 2 extra techniques that I had done but I told him both were failures. The first one he agreed it was a mess. But the 2nd one he said was what he wanted; just that I needed to add in some more functions. In the end, it was good job done for him and he said “bien jouer” which meant “well played”. And that reminded me of soccer game tomorrow. I said I had not received any emails about it and my sup said there will be a game tomorrow and he will be playing. Gosh. How come I didn’t know about it? The first thing that came to my mind was that I was kicked out of the league because I “chao geng” last week. My sup said that couldn’t be and told me to ask the other guys. So I went to ask Vincent but he said he isn’t playing. Then I asked Nicolas and he said yes there will be a game but no email sent yet. He told me to just send an email to the soccer list saying I wanted to play. I did that and immediately there was a reply with a list of selected players. My sup was a reserve in case anyone couldn’t make it. Glad that I was still in the league.

So for work, what I needed to do for now is: 1. amend some parts of the analysis and make sure it is ready to be sent to that statistician. 2. conduct experiment4 with that 5 people. My sup said to use them to finetune the coefficients. He also said that I do not need to be afraid that there will be no participants this time. This is because the guy who promised to get me 10 students from University of Rennes 2 kept his words. He told my sup that we have 10 participants waiting at our disposal. 3. Finish up the second technique that I had done. For the first one which I had made a mess, he told me to clean it up only if I got time. 4. The most important thing to him would be the paper. I think perhaps research scientist like him has to clock a certain number of papers per year. He asked when is the deadline for the 2nd assessment and I told him it is before 15th April. He said he would do it right now. I think he would be away soon. After planning how I would do all these work, I went to call up a youth hostel at Marseille. It was an answering machine again because it wasn’t within the reception hours. Have to try again tomorrow.

I chatted a bit with hui and found out that he ordered a cake in SG and sent it to his dad on his bday. Initially I thought he bought in France and FedEx back home. Come to think of it, it isn’t much of a trouble. Maybe I would do that for my mum’s bday. Will ask hui to contact that cake owner who is his friend. Then I continued with some work until 6pm when the Indian and the Chinese came to do the exp. I told them only one participant at a time and so the Chinese said he would do first and the Indian will do tomorrow. I then started to speak in Chinese with him but really find it impossible to speak fluently. Then he asked me a very embarrassing question. Did you learn Chinese by yourself or from your parents? Gnn. Sibei malu. I told him I had proper Chinese education in primary and secondary school but thereafter I am using Chinese less frequently. It is really very humiliating to be asked like this; furthermore I took Higher Chinese and Chinese Literature in secondary school. Of course I didn’t say that or else I would be adding more embarrassment to myself.

The entire experiment was conducted in English of course and his English wasn’t good; poorer than the French I would say. He didn’t understand the objective, what he had to do, and what to look out for. It took me quite some time to explain to him in Chinese but I couldn’t even know what “cursor” is called in Mandarin. Now I know it is called “zhi biao”. And I am still reading my San Guo Yan Yi here. Really felt ashamed. Although he completely kind of flopped my experiment, it was ok with me because I had other people to do in the next few days. Then we chatted a bit and having warmed up on my Chinese, I started to speak with a bit more fluency. I told him how bad it was for me during CNY, and I feel only a Chinese would feel my kind of loneliness to miss the Reunion Dinner. Then we talked about visits around the places and he said he had been to St Malo and Mont St Michel only. He said that in June there would be a pass to be bought which would make travels in Brittany cheaper. I can’t wait till June to travel around Brittany. Then I told him I would be going to London in June and he said that I might not be able to enter because of my VISA. I showed him my VISA and he said it is the same as his and we are not allowed to enter other countries because of the Schengen thing. I didn’t want to tell him that Singapore passport might have more privileges than his China passport. Scared it might offend him and he would start telling me to tell Lee Hsien Long not to visit Taiwan anymore. But I might find out about the VISA thing tomorrow since I will be going to the Office of Migration International and they wanted me to present my passport to them. Just to be doubly sure.

Overall, the meeting with the Chinese was good but wasn’t really that great. Initially I wanted him to include me into his Chinese community but after being “suan” for my Chinese, I dropped the idea. He did however ask me to send him an email anytime should I need his help. After speaking Chinese for about an hour, I felt closer to home. And I told him that I missed home very much. I never said this to my sup or any of the guys here because I think they would feel that I am being sissy. The Europeans are very independent and it is normal for them to travel around and live away from their parents. Hence, in front of them I had to pretend that I am adapting well now. But the fact is if I can go home tomorrow, I would do so. Wait. I would finish my three weeks tour first and then go home.

PS: the girl always with the wet towel was cooking at the same time as me in the kitchen tonight. Almost can’t recognize her with her clothes on. Could only remember her yellow towel. She had an angel’s sweet voice when she said “Bon appetite” to me. But she was too big size to have such a sweet voice.