by Ava Paris
I know that I engage in a lot of self-policing, as that is what you need to be a successful woman in this world. You have to be more Christian than the Christians, or at least more clever, hard working, and deserving than the men in your field to get at least half as far as them.
Working hard in the lab or in the classroom was never going to be enough for me. I would need to work hard in a lot of ways my male counterparts didn’t have to. When I did have success, people would always question how much I deserved it, something they would never do for a man in the same position.
But today, I was talking about another man who I worked with who, even though he wasn’t questioning how much I deserved my success or whether I deserved anything at all, he was forcing me to question my professional ethics.
“See, I would never date a colleague, don’t shit where you eat.” I said, and my girlfriend Samantha who has the dirtiest of dirty minds laughed beside me.
“But, this guy, he is, he is kind of special.” I told my friends.
“Maybe you could just sleep with him?” Samantha asked. “Wait until he is about to go back to Sweden, and bang him on your desk.”
I stared at Samantha. Me talking about not shitting where I ate was one thing, but Samantha talking about me banging someone on the desk at work was another. She was so naughty.
“I don’t know…” I began, and my tummy filled with butterflies.
“What don’t you know?” Samantha half-demanded. “If he is going to be a good fuck?” She let out a little laugh and I rolled my eyes.
“No. I am sure he will be a, a - great fuck.” I said. I was sure I could keep up with Samantha’s naughtiness, I had already had three cocktails. “It isn’t that.”
“What is it then?” She asked.
I took a deep breath. What was my problem? I wasn’t totally sure. I liked the guy, and he was hot. Why couldn’t I just bang him?
Then a scary realization came across my mind completely unbidden. Maybe, maybe he was someone who I liked in a different way. Maybe he was someone who I had a little bit more than a crush on. I pushed the thought aside.
If I wasn’t going to shit where I ate and sleep with him, nothing else would matter soon. He would be leaving for Sweden, and I would be getting back to my single young cute professor life, living near campus and arriving late to Monday morning lectures because I had had weekends like this.
“Well?” My friend prodded, and all the thoughts in my mind felt like they took up so much space that I couldn’t quite get the words out.
I just made a sad face and shook my head.
“Honey, I think you should just sleep with him if that’s what you want to do.” She told me.
“Do you think?” I asked.
“Yes!” She said without hesitation.
I looked over at our two other friends who hadn’t said anything yet - they hadn’t had a chance - for some support. They just smiled at me.
I knew it, Samantha knew it. We all knew it. This was my internal prohibition. I was not sleeping with him - and not pursuing him - because of fears I had about not being taken seriously at work, or having to deal with other unpleasantness of others at work knowing what was happening in any - and every - form it could take.
Of course the guy wouldn’t care. Of course most of my colleagues wouldn’t care. Some might even be happy for me if they knew. But it was for the rest, and for my professional reputation that I can’t do it.
This was my problem.
“Oh, I don’t know.” I said. “I might be being silly.”
“Yes. Yes you are.” Samantha said and rose her glass up as if to say ‘cheers!’ before downing it in one.
“I am going to the ladies room.” She said to the table.
After she left, our conversation moved on to other topics. My other girlfriends were also in that lovely fun single phase, but they were over talking about it.
So, we talked about work for the rest of the night.
I guess that’s what happens. You go to work for a third of your life, think about it for a third, and rest from it for a third. That wasn’t what they thought would happen when they invented the eight hour work day - although most of us worked more than that - but it was what was happening now.
At least my work was something that I loved I told myself. My work was something that I loved enough to protect from making a mess of things, even if that mess was a gorgeous Swedish man who was clever and funny. Oh, and yummy. Definitely yummy. The the thoughts of just reaching out and touching him were coming back. I let them swim in my mind though instead of batting them away. My thoughts of touching him were too good to not enjoy.
Chapter Seven
It had taken the university far too long to really make space for William. He had been tailing me for ages without the promised desk space so he could do his own work. Initially when I bought this up with him he sort of just shrugged it off. He said that it was fine, that he didn’t need that to do his work. He told me that he was learning far more from me than he had initially expected and that if I didn’t mind, he would like to keep learning from me. I was flattered, so I said it was fine. He continued shadowing me in my lectures or offering to help PhD and honors students I was supervising with their work.
Feeling bad for him, I raised the issue with some of the staff who supported professors. They were surprised at first, almost like they hadn’t heard about him, then without so much as another word, a desk was added to my office for him with a computer.
The office had already been really crowded so I was surprised that they managed to fit another desk in but I was also happy for him. He could do his own work now and his desk sat right across from mine so when we were working at our desks we had our backs to one another. A good feature that meant he would distract me a lot less.
With an up-and-coming conference on climate - an ever more important issue - I had a few papers which I would be presenting and a ‘climate and land use’ panel, a ‘women in science’ and a few other panels which I was sitting on coming up, so I would have less patience to deal with William on a daily basis anyway.
William was kind about everything, giving me space not just because he had his own desk to work at now but also because he recognized that I needed it. I was grateful for that at first, although I wouldn’t say it out loud. It had been good to have a little extra help - someone to carry my things to classes, or help answer students sometimes repetitive questions - but it was nice to have more time to myself, to drink fewer coffees with him and be able to focus more on my data, and my papers.
Something interesting happened though.
It was on a dreary Tuesday afternoon. I didn’t mind gray days because I told myself that these were actually fantastic days to do work, you didn’t look out the window and want to be outside like you would on a typically sunny warm day. Instead, you were happy to sit at your desk and stare at numbers all day or read reports or even re-read your own papers. There was nothing to miss outside, so being inside made sense. Being productive made sense.
So I was.
I was pouring over large data sets and trying to preform my statistical analysis. I was struggling a bit though, and not because it was difficult work. Of course, this heavy math would be difficult work for many people, however, I had been doing it for years and was well used to it. No, the problem was that William wasn’t here like he should be.
He was always around somewhere. Either helping me or sitting nearby doing his own work quietly. I had gotten so used to his presence that when he wasn’t there, I would notice.
His residency at the university had been going on for a little over a month, I reminded myself as I tried to ignore the butterflies in my tummy when visions of him and questions about his whereabouts popped up in minds eye.
He had been there long enough that many of our guest professors would have moved on by now. It was unusual that he was still at the university, and that he was still available to me.
I hadn’t really so
ught his help with anything as I felt I should be doing. I just didn’t need it right now. I knew the moment he left the university I would need his opinion on something, or want to riff about some of my ideas and he wouldn’t be here for that, but I couldn’t help that I didn’t have any of those questions right now.
That day though as I was staring over at his desk, my eyes unfocused as I thought about what it would be like to not have him there, William walked in confidently. He didn’t say anything about being late, he just smiled at me and said hello. Those butterflies were back. I felt like a teenager again.
“Can you help me with something?” He asked me.
I cocked my head to the side. “Sure.” I told him.
He smiled and reached for his computer to turn it on.
“Can I get you a coffee?” He asked.
I was still drinking this mornings coffee and shook my head. He smiled and turned back to the computer, logging on.
As the computer loaded he told me, “I wanted to get some help with a few things. Your opinion, that’s what I wanted.” He told me.
“Sure.” I told him. I would have done anything he told me to in that moment after having missed him. I wasn’t comfortable with the level of power this gorgeous man had over me, but then at the same time, I figured it didn’t matter because he didn’t know about it. It would have mattered - and made a huge difference in my life - if he knew the power he had and wielded it in a more conscious way. Since he wasn’t aware though, it was fine I told myself.
“I can’t really go into detail with my research, it’s complicated and boring. I just want your thoughts on my math for a start. If you can see any errors.” He told me as he bought up a spread sheet full of numbers. I looked it over and didn’t see anything obvious, but without knowing what the data was for, I could only help so much.
“I can’t see anything, but, what am I looking for?” I asked.
William shrugged and showed me another spreadsheet.
“This one?” He asked me.
I shook my head as I looked at the screen. “I can’t see anything, but, what am I looking for?” I asked.
He showed me another without saying anything and I continued to shake my head.
“Thank you.” He told me. “I am going to get a coffee.”
I stared at his retreating back as he left the office to get a coffee. What was he doing? There was a split second that I thought of going back to my desk, but then I was too curious and decided to do what I really wanted to do instead. I turned to face his computer again and opened up the files I had been looking at with him. There was plenty of data he was working with. When I looked hard enough at the raw data I could see trends, but I had no idea what the data was. It was just numbers. Numbers with no meaning really just meant that it could be anything. UV rays throughout the course of a year or how late people ran for meetings on average. I could see that it was annual data though because of the amount of it that was here, but the numbers and what they represented were foreign to me.
They didn’t appear to be temperatures, or altitude, or, what were they?
I closed down the files to where they were when he left for his coffee and moved back to my computer. There wasn’t anyone in the room, but that wouldn’t last and I didn’t want anyone to see me messing with a colleagues computer or their data. Not a good look.
Taking my place in front of my own computer I got back to my own work, this time looking for excuses to ask William for his opinion on various points of research. He came back with his coffee and was working quietly at his own computer when I found something, this time in the data from another lake.
“Hey William, can I borrow you for a second?” I asked casually.
William looked up and smiled. “Sure.” He told me, standing up and walking towards me. “What do you need?”
He had quickly learned to talk like an Australian I reflected as he came towards me. I remembered the sometimes awkward way he would communicate with me in English just a month ago. How quickly people could adapt I thought to myself as I bought up my own data set.
“I wanted to know, this was another lake, and there were those same anomalies you saw in the last one, but when I compared the days, they were for the days after the ones in the first data set.” I told him.
“Hm.” He said as he moved towards my mouse and started clicking around my water temperature data.
“I wouldn’t normally think anything of it.” I told him. “I just found it odd that the same data had appeared twice, the same temperatures and everything, but on a lake about one thousand kilometers away from the first one.”
“Hm.” He said, turning towards me slightly. “Do you have the other lakes data?”
I nodded, took the mouse back and went in search of that lakes data.
“You were saying it had something to do with climates trend towards getting hotter and more unstable when you saw it the first time, but if it’s happening in different lakes at different times, how can that be?” I asked as I searched for the data, feeling the kind of nervous excitement that only nerdy scientists can feel sharing their work and ideas with others.
“Who collected the data from both lakes?” He asked.
“The first was collected by a PhD candidate. The second was collected by me with a device I had put in place to check water temperatures and send me the data remotely on a daily basis. It checks the water daily and sends the data directly to me, there is no way it can be interfered with by a third party.” I told him, foreseeing what the next logical question could be.
“Is it possible the students wrote down the wrong date, or this device has the wrong date?” He asked me.
I shrugged as I found the first data set, the one he had seen and started to tell me was more significant than I had thought.
He looked the data set over then set up the desktop of my computer so both data sets would appear side-by-side as he compared them.
“These are all off by a day.” He told me, looking closely at the beginning and end of the data set. “I think the students are wrong. They probably wrote down the wrong date, or sent you data that was off by a day. But, it is all off by a day by the looks of it, which will make it easier to correct.” He told me.
I sighed deeply. I had hoped that this would show him - and me - that he was wrong, because what he had said had made no real sense to me, plus if it were true then this project was going to take a completely different turn than what I wanted it to because of the data.
Then he looked down at me and I felt my stomach do a back flip, forgetting momentarily where I was or what I had been thinking. Just then the sun came out from behind a cloud and the whole office lit up. I looked over at the window and so did he, breaking the tension I wasn’t sure it was just me who felt anymore.
“Fair enough.” I told him, ignoring the tension as I always tried to do, hoping it would go away if I just behaved like it wasn’t there in the first place. “I’ll have to deal with this.”
“But, you can see what I meant the last time?” He asked, and I stared at him for a long moment.
“What you meant the last time?” I asked.
William nodded. “Yes, what I meant the last time. That this data is showing you something bigger.”
I nodded. “Sort of. I don’t know. I can’t see the bigger thing in just two data sets from two lakes. I would need more data, and I am not looking for what you are saying is there. I am looking at other things.” I told him.
“Let me show you.” He told me. I could feel a lump in my throat as he moved a little closer and my mind was wiped of every thought that had anything to do with work instantly. Sure, this was important stuff, and I knew it. My body knew what it wanted though, and William had never been sexier than right now when he was in his element. Instead of before, when he had basically been my sidekick.
Chapter Eight
I was wrong. I really did need some help with some of this data. Although it was too close to the climate conferenc
e for me to present most of my findings, it was still good to be doing the work. It felt great to be doing work, to feel like I was moving forward as a scientist even if I couldn’t show my work just yet.
Deadlines are not that important I reminded myself as I found more old data that was showing the same trends. Trends which I had previously thought were anomalies. I showed these data sets to William as they came up and he and I collected and collated all of our data.
He was sharing much of his work with me now and we went from being colleagues who lived in our own little silos - with him often visiting my solo to attend my classes or help my honors and PhD students - to colleagues who actually collaborated. The change was huge, and I did quietly feel as though we should have made this change a long time ago. I knew it was me who hadn’t wanted to share my work with him for the first month or so, and I was kicking myself for behaving that way now. I had told myself there was nothing in my own work that I really needed help with when actually, collaboration doesn’t mean you need help at all. Collaboration is a fantastic way to work together and find things that you could never find if you were just one person working alone.
There was another side though. Even though it was easy for me to blame myself for not taking advantage of this wonderful mind in front of me and work together in a collaborative manner, I had to be realistic. There is a long history of female scientists work being stolen by male scientists, and even my university had a culture that excluded female researchers for a large part, but that wasn’t what William was about, and it had taken me a while to trust that he was genuine.
Sometimes when you look back at something your past self did with the eyes you have today, that thing can look silly or even like it was a waste of time or energy. Those are the times when we have to extend the most compassion to ourselves. We only got to where we are now because of where we were before. We only know what we know now because our past selves collected that knowledge for us. If we hadn’t made the mistake - or made the time to learn that a choice wasn’t a mistake - we wouldn’t know that it was a mistake now.
