Day 61: The Biggest Idiot in Germany

Every Wednesday, I have physical chemistry lab sessions. Today's experiment was about determining polymer structures using X-ray diffraction. This session wasn't held in the university labs but rather at the Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research. Now, let's get to the point: the professor in charge of the lab was, by far, the biggest idiot I've ever had the pleasure of meeting in Germany.

Idiot

As soon as we arrived, he told us that we wouldn't be conducting any experiments because the machine we needed was broken. Instead, he sat us down next to two German girls (there were two groups of two people in the session) and started asking questions about the experiment. While he asked the girls logical and simple yes-or-no questions that actually made sense—such as, "If I increase the intensity of the X-rays, does the intensity reaching the detector also increase?"—he bombarded us with completely random and irrelevant questions about details that had absolutely no significance for what we were supposed to do. For example: "What material is the X-ray tube window made of?" or (and this is a real question, I didn't mishear or misunderstand it) "What is behind B?" (B was a meaningless term in an equation). Oh, and another one: "What was the first technique in history used to detect X-rays?" (How the hell should I know?! I already spent my whole weekend struggling to translate your useless lab script that serves no purpose!). Since we couldn't answer any of his ridiculous questions, he had the perfect excuse to ignore us for the rest of the session—which is exactly what he did. He didn't even look at us. He spent four hours explaining the entire experiment in German exclusively to the German girls, never once stopping to ask if we were following along or if we understood him. And to top it all off, at the end, he asked us even more stupid questions (I flat-out refused to answer). He even had the nerve to tell the German girls that if they wanted, they didn't have to let us sign the lab report, because we were bound to do it wrong anyway… Yeah, thanks for your help, idiot!