Camera Obscura: Outliers actual play chapter 1

Chapter 1 of Camera Obscura, written by Matt Boothman after Samantha Leigh

Day 1

Does anyone on here know if the university has an Adobe account? I’m wondering how easy it is to switch to e-signatures for participant consent forms. I know the IRB prefers a wet signature, but today mine keeps dripping right off the paper. In my last interview, the subject ($ERUMBUS) didn’t want to start until I’d got it pinned down, and that put me behind. (If anyone else has the same issue: it finally stuck for me after I switched to the version I used to sign in my tweens, the one I thought of as my ‘autograph’ rather than my signature.) Maybe it’s too big a process change to suggest on my first day assisting a new PI, but it’ll be a bigger change if we decide to do it later and we have to go back and get all the participants to sign again.

Just in case, I’m going to send out a blast to the email list and ask everyone to update their details. Even if we end up sticking to wet signatures, it’s worth doing every now and then to weed out the inactives.

How to snag your study a No Cost Extension and win your Principal Investigator’s eternal gratitude on your first day: a newbie research assistant’s guide

(Caveat: almost definitely not reproducible, but sharing in case anyone else on here feels lucky.)

1. Mass-email the lab contact list.

2. Step away from the PC for an hour to copy flyers.

2.i) Add another hour away for troubleshooting the copier. (If anyone else encounters error code a3t3r:0ur0, you can get it to switch back from your baby photos to the original images by huffing on the scanner glass and writing NEVER WAS I with your finger in the mist.)

2.ii) Leave the lab to put up the flyers. (Anyone who sees the ones with baby me in the bath on them around campus and feels like saying something: all I have to say is here in the Curzon Lab, we don’t waste good paper.)

2.iii) Back at the lab, package up the copier for return to the leasing company at your PI’s request. Apparently once this model starts throwing those a3t3r:0ur0 errors, it’s never that long before all it can print is death certificates. (I did point out my workaround, but it sounds like if you claim you can’t fix it then the leasing company just replaces like new. You might still need the fix if your lab’s not leasing, though.)

2.iv) Once sealed and labelled, ignore the sounds and smells from inside the package. The school swimming pool where you had your first kiss is almost definitely not in there, no matter what the copier wants you to think.

3. Finally get back to the PC and do not panic. Remember that getting a response from every single recipient of the email blast is a positive sign for the study. The responses won’t make sense individually, but if you hide the headers you can skim more efficiently.

4. Compile all the single-word responses in the order they hit the inbox. A pause of ten minutes or more between emails indicates a full stop. Read the compiled text at least twice.

5. Follow the instructions. If you start to hesitate, remind yourself this is what science is. You can get away with some substitutions and updates as long as they’re in the spirit of the instructions. A GoPro and LED projector make an acceptable stand-in for the pinhole camera, for example, but a white noise machine is not equivalent to an FM radio tuned to static (the design intention differs).

6. If you get everything right and The Thousand Eyed Abyss opens, you’re basically home free at that point. Something presumably happens which you won’t be able to remember afterwards, so how could it matter, and when it’s over the projector will have lightly etched the newly extended study deadline onto the wall.

7. Give your PI the good news and (if your PI is cool like mine) enjoy a slice of celebratory NCE pizza while you add four working days’ padding to all the study milestones.

If anyone else here tries this, I really want to know what happens! If you can get more detail on step 6, maybe set up a second GoPro to record what happens while The Thousand Eyed Abyss is open, I imagine that’d be really helpful for others in the future too.

Call for evidence:

I bet no one on here has ever had as eventful a first day on a study as I’ve had today.

I’m actually willing to bet no one on here has had a single day on any study quite as action-packed as my very first day on this one.

I’ve had the complete research assistant experience compressed into ten hours: scheduling, flyering, e-recruitment, subject interviews, study admin. The works.

And that’s just the stuff I knew to expect. Then on top of that? As if that wasn’t enough for one day?

Wait for it:

We got audited.

An NCE pizza party and an eleventh-hour spot audit on the same day.

When panic is curdling the mozzarella in your stomach, it can be easy to momentarily forget that correlation is not causation and karmic balance is not a scientifically valid concept. Really, if this audit was triggered by anything, it was more likely the issues I had getting that consent form properly countersigned this morning.

But I had trouble finding the detachment to think that rationally with the auditing body seeping down the wall into the regulatory binder, within spitting distance of where I sat shaking in my squeaky swivel chair.

Especially – and this is the real reason I’m posting about this on here – especially once I realised the IRB blood seal of approval was there on the desk, under my greasy paper pizza plate, instead of in the regulatory binder, where the auditing body would be expecting to find it.

In most audit horror stories, the Institutional Review Board gets painted as the enemy. But our real enemy here is complacency. I know we’re just research assistants, but the research we assist with at this institution is expanding the limits of human understanding. The rules and regs are there for important reasons. To make sure that when our studies discover things no one ever knew before, our findings really do show what we think they do. To make sure we’re coming by those findings honestly. All so the next steps forward for humankind are onto firm, reliable ground, not some brittle lattice of cut corners and stretched suppositions. If we let ourselves relax our rigour for one moment, whether it’s because we’re tired, or bored, or relieved about a hunch paying off, then we are betraying everyone who will ever benefit from the work we’re doing. They expect us to have checked and double-checked, and when we get complacent, we’re lying to them all.

I just about got away with it this time–

(My squeaking chair tipped off the auditing body that I was in the room and she was actually mortified – she said she’d never have let herself into the lab like that if she’d thought anyone would still be there working late. She offered to get me something from the vending machine to offset the shock and loss of electrolytes and I was able to apply the blood seal to the relevant pages while she was out there)

–but I really shouldn’t have. Even a rollercoaster day like today is no excuse for overlooking something that important. If there’s a silver lining, it’s that this near miss happened so early in my time assigned to the study. I’ll be fully alert from now on, and another day as intense as today is unlikely.