Extra hours in the lab

There’s always a shit-ton of work to be done in the lab. You’ve discovered that Michelle is something of a savant when it comes to this stuff, and that’s come with the realization that you’ll have to put in many, many hours before you can come close to matching her. While Professor Styles hasn’t been tough on any deadlines yet, you figure that you’d rather pull ahead than fall behind, so here you are at the lab again.

When you get to the lab at this late hour, you’re somehow not surprised to see the lights still on. The grad students, Jamal and Abdul, are hunched at their desks, both of them completely zoned in. Best not to disturb them. You take a peek at Professor Styles’ door. Though it’s locked, you can see the light spilling out from under it too. Workaholics, this bunch…

The irony of that statement is lost on you.

You take a seat at one of the open spots in the room, taking care to not disturb anyone as you log in to the system and get oriented again. Michelle and Professor Styles have put together a clear task management system, and you {if StyleLabCount > 2} are chastened at the number of tasks still outstanding. {else} despair at the number of tasks still outstanding. {endif} You always knew that publishing scientific papers was hard, but this really puts it into perspective. There’s a bunch of tasks assigned to you, and you refresh yourself on what you need to do next. Now that Michelle’s finished building out a new piece of the engine, there are some simulations you need to run, so you begin by playing around with the features, trying to get an intuitive grasp of how it works.

That comes pretty quickly. But unfortunately, understanding isn’t enough. What you have to implement is tricky.

Before long, you’re up at the whiteboard, scrawling out diagrams, sketching out a plan of attack, and a couple minutes later, you sit back at your computer, satisfied with what you have. It takes a bit more time to translate your scrawlings on the board into something in code. A few implementations hiccups later and you’ve written something that begins running without error. That’s promising.

You get up to take a quick stretch break. In the hour that you’ve been working, it seems like Jamal and Abdul haven’t moved an inch, except for their fingers frantically tapping away at the keyboard. Don’t these guys have to stop to think?

A short bathroom break later, you return to your computer. You don’t expect your simulations to have finished running: that’ll probably have to go overnight. But you can at least check the logs to make sure everything’s going smoothly. You’ve already had to debug a few times. Though you’re pretty sure you got it right this time, you never really know until the simulation wraps up.

Then, you open the logs.

ESTIMATED TIME TO COMPLETION: 254 years, 3 months, 22 days, 7 minutes

Well. That seems like a bit of a problem. Something tells you that Professor Styles would like to get this project done before her great-great-great-great-great-grandkids are born.

You take a careful look at the logs again, trying to diagnose the problem, and scan through the code. It takes a couple minutes, but you think you find the source of the problem. But when your ‘fix’ does nothing to help the issue, you frown. Back to the whiteboard it is.

The going this time is slower. You wrote working code, but getting code to run fast? That seems like a job for a computer scientist or something, but not you. All you know is chemistry, and not even terribly well at that. You sigh.

After a couple minutes spent brainstorming, you’ve scribbled down two more ways to approach the simulation, but you’re not sure either of them are faster. You begin to wonder if there’s parts of the engine that are just slow and if they could be optimized better, but fixing that also seems a bit beyond your paygrade. Or is it? You spend a while thinking about which step is causing the slowdown and what you might do to speed it up…

You’re so engrossed in your thoughts that you don’t notice Professor Styles standing behind you until she taps you on the shoulder, a sparkle in her eye.

“I see you’re working hard tonight,” she says, giving you a warm smile. “Stuck on something?”

“Yeah, this simulation is taking way too long to run,” you say, pointing at the whiteboard.

Professor Styles stares at your diagrams, narrowing her eyes, and then she scratches her chin.

“Good thoughts, I really like this idea,” she says, tapping on the board, and you grin. “Unfortunately, I’m not sure it will help all that much with your current task, but you should definitely keep it in mind for the future.”

“Dang,” you say, feeling a bit disappointed. “Do you know how to fix this?”

“Let me take a quick look at your code,” she says.

You both return to your laptop. Professor Styles leans over your shoulder as you talk through your code to her. She nods along, and then when you get to a certain line, she snaps her fingers.

“Ah, that’s the culprit!” she says.

“Isn’t this just a standard operation?” you ask. It’s a function you’ve called plenty of times before without running into any trouble.

“It is, but it’s got a lot of trouble with the classes of molecules we’re studying. Something about the underlying matrix computations,” she says. “Here, try using this implementation instead.”

She bends over you, hands brushing over yours, and imports an alternate library, replacing your function call with a new one in a couple keystrokes. You’re mostly just mesmerized by the smell of her perfume and her tits hovering right by your face, because that turtleneck she’s got on is doing nothing to hide the shape of her bust.

“Okay, now give this a whirl,” she says, distracting you from her distractions.

“Err.. okay, yes,” you say, scanning over what she’s changed.

When you run the code, the difference is night and day.

“Estimated completion time’s down to two days,” you say. “That’s amazing!”

“I’ve still got a couple tricks up my sleeve,” your professor says with a wink. “There’s nothing like a bit of hands-on experience to pass it down.”

“I’ll be sure to come regularly to get more of it, Professor” you say, and she laughs.

“I’m looking forward to it,” she says. “And call me Mandy. Professor feels a bit formal, don’t you think?”

“Then I’ll be sure to get more of it from you, Mandy,” you say, and she laughs.

“I feel a decade younger already!”

Styles +15