Travel with children, Part 2

A conference looks like a great opportunity, but then everything goes horribly wrong...

Previously: not surprisingly, Part 1.

I don't want you to think I'm one of those students who does nothing but complain about their supervisor. Sure, he's a lot of hard work, and all those warnings before I started my PhD turned out to be true — the end of my social life, having to pay attention to his needs at all hours of the day, the sleepless nights, the bouts of depression and guilty surges of resentment — but in the end, I have to admit I love the guy. There are some mornings, before he starts screaming, when I honestly feel thankful that Professor Ian Barn is in my life.

That's not how I felt at the beginning of this conference trip to Barcelona.

He wanted to come too.

I wasn't sure I could handle it. The long flight. Navigating a foreign city. Managing him in restaurants. And the conference itself would be bedlam — hundreds of his fellow professors, yelling and arguing and out of control. Not to mention their students. In private they all whinge, but in public they do nothing but boast about their precious little tyrants, and scurry around after them, “protecting” them from myriad imagined dangers and insults. How would I cope?

The only way to survive is to find a little something in it for yourself. In a year I am due to finish my PhD and I need a postdoc position. My top pick research group is run by Professor Bambina, and she would be at the conference. This might be my chance to talk to her and win her over. Even better would be if my supervisor put in a good word, but that seemed unlikely, given that he's not yet at the developmental stage to be fully aware of other human beings. My best chance was to arrange a meeting between Bambina and Barn. A professors playdate.

I put it to Prof. Barn on the way to the airport. He was in a good mood, watching the aeroplanes out of the taxi window.

He shook his head. “She's too loud.”

What was he talking about? “You're all loud!”

“And she's a biter.”

Hmm. There was no point pushing it now. In a few hours his brain would reset. I would try again in the evening.  

No such luck. There was a hold-up at baggage claim and terrible traffic going in to Barcelona and by the time we got to the hotel he was overtired and grumpy. We shared a room, to save costs on his grant, and it took me over an hour to calm him down to sleep. By that time my nerves were shot, so I hit the minibar until the exhaustion finally overcame my nervous tension.

It felt like only a moment later that he woke up crying.

“I had a nightmare!”

I dragged myself out of my bed and shuffled over to his, trying to make calming shushing sounds. “It's all over now,” I said. “Lie down and go back to sleep.”

“It was Bambina!” he cried. “She won a prize!”

“It's ok, it was only a dream.”

“I thought I was going to win, then she won instead. She was taunting me with it. She was hitting me with her medal.” He turned to me with the most miserable heartbroken terrified face. “And you were gone!” he screamed. “You left me and went to work for her.”

My heart softened. The poor guy! This was no time to explain to him that one day, incredible as it seemed, we would live in different places — and in fact he would be happy about it!

“There, there,” I said. “I'm here now. I'm not going anywhere.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes, of course. I'm right here.”

“Can you read to me for a while?”

“What would you like to hear?”

“You could go through the slides for your talk again.”

I got out my laptop and talked through my slides in a quiet voice, speaking slower and more quietly with each slide. In the beginning he suggested corrections, but with each slide they got fewer and less insistent, and eventually he drifted back to sleep.

The next day I sought out Bambina's student, Petra. I don't like her. She's always in a state of paranoid panic. She works in one of the top research groups in the field, but she is perpetually convinced that her career is on the verge of ruin. And she treats Prof. Bambina as if she's more precious than a Ming vase.

“We love your latest paper,” I said. “Could we meet later to discuss it? There's a restaurant Prof. Barn was interested to try.”

Finding food all the professors will eat is one of the biggest headaches of conferences. That's what makes Barcelona great. All that cured meat and manchego cheese and patatas brava — they love it!

Petra wasn't sold. “Barn can be very aggressive.”

The lack of sleep made me thoughtless. “Oh, come on!” I snapped. “He's the one who's worried about getting bitten.”

She rounded on me. “What are you saying about my Bambina? She's the sweetest thing ever.”

I tried to backtrack, but everything I said just made it worse.

Then Bambina came over. Whining, as usual. “I'm bored. What are we doing now?”

“There's another session of talks in five minutes.”

“I don't want to go! They look boring! I want to see the city!”

Now Barn bounded past. “I want to go to the Gaudi park,” he said.

Bambina's face lit up. She turned to Petra, and Barn turned to me, and they both hopped up and down and cried, “Can we? Please! Can we?”

Reprieve: we were off to the park!

An afternoon at Parc Guell should make it all seem worthwhile, with all those fantastic Gaudi buildings and sculptures, popping up amidst the hilly lawns and trees and paths, except, of course, that it was hot, and I was exhausted from lack of sleep, and I was with two highly-strung professors and a crazy over-protective PhD student.
 
Petra was worried about Bambina in the heat. We walked up the big staircase to the room with all the huge columns, where it was cool and shady. The professors were thrilled and rushed off to explore, chattering away as if they were best friends. (So much for hating each other!) Petra and I sat on a bench near the top of the stairs, near a sculpture of a dragon, where we would see the professors if they came out. I tried to think of something to talk about.

“What are you working on these days?”

She recoiled from me in horror, as if I was trying to spy on her research, but then her ego got the better of her: she had nothing to fear from me.

She launched into a lecture on her latest project. I was immediately depressed. We worked in the same field, but I had no idea what she was talking about! It was just a stream of jargon. I zoned out and let the first few sentences float around for a while in my head. Eventually I realised that I understood them after all. They weren't difficult, just expressed in fancy terminology. It turned out that what she was working on was good, but nothing I couldn't do as well. That made me feel better.

Then I felt much better: this was all because of Prof. Bambina! She somehow taught her students to be confident and impressive. If I went to work for her, I could learn to do it, too! Even if I kept working on the same only-sightly-above-average topics as I did now, I would learn how to talk about them in a way that made people think I was a rock star.

All I had to do was find a way to get Bambina to hire me.

That made me think of something.

I interrupted Petra. “Um, where are the professors?”

“Oh shit!”

We both jumped up and ran up the steps into the room of columns. There was no-one there.  

We ran past the huge columns, wildly looking from left to right, hoping Barn and Bambina had been obscured behind one of them. Still no-one.

Petra was hysterical. “They could be anywhere!” she screamed. “They could have left the park and been run over!”

“I'm sure they're still in the park,” I said, but not with much confidence.

“They could have been kidnapped!”

“Ha!” I scoffed. “I wouldn't want to be their kidnapper!”

That wasn't the right time for a joke. If she wasn't so frantically running around looking for them in the same places she'd already checked, she would have beaten me to a pulp.

“Let's spread out!” she said. We both ran off to different sections of the park.

All the things that make Parc Guell wonderful — huge, on a hill, packed with fantastic creations that provide endless nooks and crannies and hiding places — make it a nightmare when you're trying to find two wayward professors. I ran all the way down to the entrance at the bottom, and all the way back up to the stairs where we started.

I felt overwhelmed by panic and despair. It was so hot, and I was so tired, and I had no idea why I had done this to my life, and I couldn't even begin to face thinking what might have happened to those two poor innocent creatures.

Petra and I met up again, out of breath and terror-stricken.

“Where can they be!?” we both yelled at each other.

I ran back into the room of columns, desperately hoping we had missed them the first time. At the side was another set of steps. I hadn't spotted those before. I immediately had visions that they led directly up to a park exit and onto a major highway. I staggered up the steps.

They lead to the roof — a huge flat roof with views across the entire park. And at the balcony at the edge, our lost professors! They were looking at the park, chatting quietly, and perfectly safe. I ran up to them, but was too out of breath to speak.

“We saw you and Petra running around the park!” cried Barn. “You were very funny.”

I stared at him. As usual, relief quickly transformed into a raging need to scream at him. For now all I could do was pant, “What have you been doing?”

“We were just talking,” said Barn.

“That's right,” said Bambina. “Ian has told me that you're the best student ever.”

Ok, maybe no screaming. “What?”

“Oh yes, you sound great. How would you like to come and work for me?”

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I had fun experimenting with the Professor-Toddler Correspondence conceit — let me know what you thought!