There was no comment from the room. Carmen couldn’t believe that she was the only one to have completed that many experiments. But it made sense, if you tried doing them one at a time in order you might only complete the first four or five by the end of the week. 

“Out of the experiments you have completed is there anyone you want to work with?”

“No. There is only one person I want to work with, the blue-pen-large-lab-coat guy whose experiment I am working on but haven’t finished,” Carmen said with a red face and finger pointed again at the tall theorist. 

“Why do you want to work with him?”

“Because I understood what he was looking for with his experiment. Everyone else’s was just testing techniques. Techniques are easily learned, but he was looking for someone with fundamental skills like time management, so he made a three-day experiment that would take time but was easy and if you planned enough you could complete other experiments during your downtime,” Carmen explained. 

“Okay, it sounds like you thought a lot about this. Are you sure you don’t want to work with a girl?”

“I’m sure. I don’t have a good history with female theorists. And on that note, you should know that I’m clumsy. But because of that, I learned the fundamental skills that you were looking for.”

“That’s interesting. Anyways you can think about it, theorist. Researcher, you may sit down. Is there anyone else who wants to give it a go?”

There was no response from the research crowd and lunch was over almost as soon as it had started. Carmen wanted to die, she knew she had to go back to the lab and that the theorists were there. There were so many of them that she had offended today, the female theorists and the ones with bad handwriting. She hoped that they would leave her alone. The thing Carmen was most frightened of was freaking everyone out about being able to match human smells. 

When the researchers returned to the lab, they acted the same as before, ignoring each other to complete as many experiments as possible before 5 pm, Friday. If anything the other female researchers were glad there was one less guy that they could potentially be paired with. The theorists just avoided Carmen, who was spinning down her fungal cells in a centrifuge, before looking for the DNA isolation kit. She found it on the top shelf of one of the refrigerators and grabbed it, she returned to her lab bench with it and her fungal cells in tow and proceeded to isolate the DNA. Once it was isolated, she tested the sample for purity, and when the parameters came back confirming she had DNA, she knew it was okay for her to move onto the next portion of the experiment. But there was no more time today for that, she wanted to review the other experiments again and check for the materials she needed. It felt weird thinking about the next experiment. It almost felt like it would be a waste of her time. Carmen didn’t quite enjoy chemistry as much as working with bacteria and fungi, she always felt that there was so much more you could do with the more complicated systems, but that didn’t matter. She still needed to be paired with someone and if blue-pen-guy won’t take her then she might be screwed if she doesn’t try to complete two chemistry tasks. 

Thinking about blue-pen-guy now that Carmen had a bit of time. She was wondering where he was in the lab because she assumed that all the theorists had to be there for the day. He wasn’t walking around. Earlier it was intriguing as to why he even approached her. Maybe he was just curious as to why it seemed like the only person doing experiments in his field wasn’t doing his. She hoped he was maybe a little bit happy about not being left out, but who knows. It seemed like he wasn’t in the room.