The Poster

A story about the worst nightmare than can befall a scientist

Jenny was going to miss her flight.

There was no way she could make it.

There had been no way she could make it, even before the airport shuttle got stuck in traffic.

It was a total nightmare.

The bad traffic was caused by an environmental protest. It started with protesters lying in the highway. Then a disgruntled motorist drove into one of the protesters, and now the traffic was held up by the protesters getting up out of the road, and the motorists getting out of their cars, and all of them yelling at each other. Just as the motorists were concluding what a pity it was that they had run over only one protester, the police and ambulance arrived, and the motorists realised that the single enemy casualty was about to get away, and all lay down in front of the ambulance. The police were unsure whether to negotiate, or to attempt multiple arrests, or to simply lie in the road themselves.

But Jenny had been doomed to miss her flight long before that.

She was doomed before she missed the earlier airport shuttle, and before she had to go back to her apartment for her passport, and before she spent fifteen minutes being violently ill because of her poor impulse control at the bar the night before. It was tempting to place the blame on the night before, but, in her current state of mind, it was also tempting to identify the cause as the integrated sum total of events stretching all the way back to the moment of her birth.

No, the true cause was of course the worst curse that can befall any graduate student who attends a conference: her poster.

She was quickly learning the cardinal rule of any conference: never, ever, present a poster. A poster is a guaranteed nightmare.

The most insidious part of the trap was that in the beginning the poster looked like her ticket to travel. She had to convince her PhD advisor to let her go. He ruled that she could go only if she had results to present. Needless to say, she did not have results to present. But did she have preliminary results? Of course she did! There are always “preliminary results”, even if that means, “All the things I tried didn't work, but no-one will be able to tell in the midst of copious background material and a slick graphical layout.”

And so — voila! — she had approval to attend the conference.

Let's not dwell on the hell of producing a poster; on the false sense of security of a lovely professional template provided by more senior grad students, on the excruciating hours and then days spent turning trashy mock-up diagrams and graphs into production-quality figures, on the mounting dread that she could not succinctly summarise the background because she didn't actually have a clue what any of it meant, or, most seriously of all, on the discovery that after decades of industrial-level development of basic presentation software, she was still forced to work with a program where keeping all of the boxes and figures and text and labels and references properly lined up was like asking a child to land a jet airliner on an island during a tornado.

In the end, she overcame all of that. The real problem, as every sucker who has ever produced a poster knows, was in getting the bastard printed.

She was told that the university had a printing service. She was told how to access the printing service. She was told how to deal with the inevitable series of obstacles to using the printing service. She was convinced that all would be well, even though she was now going to visit the actual office of the printing services for the first time, and see her attempts at printing her poster for the first time, on the morning before she caught the shuttle to the airport.

Given the long catalogue of hold-ups and screw-ups, perhaps she should have looked more carefully when she picked up the poster?

Did she fail to give it such a brief cursory glance because of youthful naivety? Or was it the hangover? Or was it a deep understanding that it was too late to change anything anyway?

Too late or not, she realised that she did need to change something when she got back to her apartment to collect her passport, and also to be ill, and decided to gaze triumphantly at her poster while she recovered from what she hoped was the last visit to the bathroom.

That was when she noticed that it had been printed as a mirror image. The poster would be unreadable, unless placed next to a large wall mirror.

How was that even possible? Under what circumstances would anyone ever want to print something as a mirror image?

There were inevitable minutes lost while she tried to convince herself that, once at the conference, she could buy and erect a massive mirror next to her poster — how cool would that be! — but finally had to accept reality, and wrestle with the print options and then run back to the printing office.

Now her only hope was that the flight had been delayed.

She was so exhausted and dispirited and convinced that she should just quit graduate school and accept the cosmic justice of spending the rest of her life working in a call centre, that she was somewhat mortified to find out that the flight had been delayed.

When she finally reached the airport, she discovered that her nightmare was far from over. She had to panic her way through check-in, and make a fuss to be allowed to the front of the security line, and run like crazy to catch the little train to the right terminal, and then run like crazy again to get to the right gate, and then run like crazy yet again because the gate had changed. Then, finally, miraculously, she made it onto the plane, where she could collapse onto a seat while the plane now waited in runway scheduling limbo before the flight was finally cancelled.

Somewhere in there, though, she woke up — and realised that it really was a nightmare.

As she emerged from confusion and panic, she remembered that she was no longer a graduate student. She was no longer stupid enough to agree to present posters at conferences. She was now a tenured professor, and that shit was long behind her.

She picked up her phone and looked at the time and date. Oh, yeah. It was May 16, 2020. The world was in the midst of a deadly pandemic. She hadn't left her home for two months.

She sank back into bed and wished she could go back to sleep. It hadn't been a nightmare after all. It was a dream fantasy of the best days of her life.