The Beginning of the End

So it seems that I've reached the beginning of the end now. With only 30 days left until my thesis submission and my ensuing graduation thesis defense. I have fallen behind by a precisely 30 days according to my original plan. My patience and tolerance is being tested every minute.

After all that history we've had in this lab and the separation of student room still in effect, I was really not too fond of having to deal with problems especially when I am running out of time. One day the professor came into the student room. She was talking to Matsubara, "Yeah yeah I will ask Kenneth, if he says then it's okay." I had no idea what she was talking about. In the past few weeks, he has been asking me a lot of small questions on how to write various reference citation, graph notations for his paper. He is very thick, but I didn't refuse to help him. But there are times when he really got in my face. Matsubara doesn't attend our regular presentations and he just so happened to miss mind, suddenly during my discussion with the 1st year student I'm taking care of, he butt in and started asking questions about what I was doing. I was simply not interested to tell him, but he took the powerpoint printout and started to read outloud by himself in front of us. I was not happy, I simply asked the first year student to finish asking the questions then I went back to my own work. Now that I think he was trying to appear friendly so he could ask me questions without feeling guilty.

Sometimes last week, Matsubara broke one of the computers he's been using for his analysis. He has been the only one using that computer. He asked me to take a look at it. I looked and determined it was a hardware problem so I told him that I couldn't fix it. He was persistent and started to blabbering to me in Japanese. I told him once again, I cannot fix it, and for him to call the company, this computer is still under warranty, remembering that he had just purchased this set of very expensive equipment sometime last week. I didn't think he would be that thick to ask me to do more. Everybody in this lab knows that I'm under a lot of stress, so they try not to take up my time. Although I am still helping 3,4 students and teaching them how to operate the equipments in the lab. Matsubara asked me once again to back up his data. I refused. Because the PC is still less than 1 y ear old, opening up the case would mean voiding the warranty.

The following day, he was online surfing for a new computer. He asked me to look at the specs. I looked at it and said the cheapest one would do. I know we don't have enough funding in the lab already and he's not even going to wait for a simple repair to come back. When I came back to my solar simulation room, I saw that he has piled the PC on my experiment table. It has been sitting there since then, it would seem like he didn't even want to send it back for repair. I reported all these to the professor and it fell to deaf's ear.

He has been obsessedly doing experiments almost everyday, leaving a huge pile of junk behind him on almost every desk. One day he suddenly decided to use my the desk space that I usually use. I thought it was fine, so I shifted to his deskspace because I had already cleaned it the previous day. He continued to come back to this desk space to retrieve his things. It was rather frustrating.

On Friday night, Matsubara dropped a large beaker on the floor by accident. The beaker shattered and glass shards spread the floor. He promptly took the small sweep, but for some reasons he decided that he was too busy with other things, he left the the sweep on top of the broken glasses without ever touching the glass.

On Saturday I had to do experiments, and had to walk over the broken glasses since they were right in front of my equipments. On Sunday, the Chinese student sent me a message telling me that there was a pile of glasses. I sent an email to Matsubara directly asking him to clean the glasses right away. On Monday he replied, "Understood." I was a bit surprised by his prompt reply and went to the lab to do my experiment. The majority of the broken glass pieces were still there, he only picked up the biggest 3 pieces and put them in the overloaded glass bin. He complained to me, "Someone should toss out those glasses." I had long passed down this garbage responsibility to the 2 international students, but one doesn't even go to the experiment room to do experiments, so of course he doesn't know to take it out.

The following week, right after I had cleaned the lab. He messed it up leaving garbage everywhere and piling his equipment everywhere on the desk. On top of that, he left a decent size puddle on the floor. I was very fed up. I sent an warning email to everybody in the lab, asking them to use common sense and clean after themselves. Another replied came from him, "Thank you for pointing out the problem, if there's anything I can do please let me know in the future." When I went down to the lab, he had wiped off 50% of the water and started walking on top of it, making all the floor muddy. I stopped him and said, "This is not okay." I tossed down 2 paper towel and said, "Clean." Another student followed up with another email, asking everybody to clean the room because we have a departmental safety check the following week. Before Matsubara left the room, I stopped him and asked him, "If you are using water, wait here until it fills up, don't just leave it and come back." He said, "okay okay then left"

30 minutes later, there was another big puddle of water. I didn't know if he was doing this to intimidate me or not. The other students obviously didn't care enough to confront him. It's left to me deal with this because the professor chose not to intervene at all after after I had asked her. She told me not to provoke him and that was the end of it. She was afraid that would inflict a reaction like before, making her life a living hell.

I haven't been doing experiments yesterday because he was complaining to the other student that the vibration from our equipment was causing his experiments data to be inaccurate, so I focused on writing my thesis all day. Today morning, I had planned to start my experiments right away, but the plan was soon spoiled. The operator Sasaki-san told me that there's a huge pile of water coming from the ceiling. As soon as I looked at it I knew it was from the air conditioner that the previous year students chose not to fix and left on running. A lot of the power extension cords were soaked in water, an extreme dangerous situation. I climbed up the table and disconnected the power cords and spent 1 hour with Sasaki-san wiping the water.

When I came back to the student room at around 1130am, Matsubara was sitting there.

"Did you fix it?" He asked.
I was a bit upset, and said, "Fixed WHAT?"
"Water" he said.
I said, "It's aircon"
He said, "So you fixed it?"
I said, "It can't be fixed, I turned it off"
At this point I was angry at him because he knew the problem without taking any actions.
I walked out of the room, trying to contain my anger. Before I left the room, I said, "When did this happen?"
He said, "Yesterday"
I said, "Who knew?"
He said, "I wrote email to sensei"
They knew the air con was a problem and didn't do anything. 1/2 of our lab equipments could've been fried overnight. There could've been a fire.

In the afternoon, when I was finally about to do my experiments, the school construction worker came in to fix the damaged air conditioner. I was once again interrupted. I packed up my things and escaped to the library. Before that I left my contact information to the 1st year just in case if he has any questions with his on-going experiments.

When I got back, I realize there is a big box on the floor. Our agent has devliered the supplies but I didn't not recognize that box. It was another scale. I was very very angry at this point, because we have already spent 1/2 of the year's budget within 2 months because of him. Now he buys something new again when he doesn't even take good care of the current functional equipment that we have.

The next 30 days... will be extremely difficult...