Misinterpretation: Stories about misreading the situation

To err is human, even if you’re a scientist. In this week’s episode, both storytellers share moments about a time when they got things a bit wrong.

Part 1: As a newly minted postdoc, Eric Jankowski has the perfect solution to help his mentees.

Eric Jankowski is an associate professor in the Micron School of Materials Science and Engineering at Boise State University, where he helps students use computers to engineer new materials. He loves bicycles and hates leaf blowers.

Part 2: Science journalist Eric Boodman gets in a little too deep on an assignment about a senior care home.

Eric Boodman is a reporter for STAT whose work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Undark, and The New York Times Magazine. He's written about entomologists who specialize in fictional infestations, unscientific infant death investigations, and mysterious appearances of exotic arachnids in a Nazi air-raid shelter, and his features have won a number of awards, including the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for young science journalists, the American Society of Magazine Editors "Next" Award for journalists under 30, and the New America Award for public service coverage of immigrant communities.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

I'm 13 years old and my face is pressed against the window of the rental car my dad's driving across the Arizona desert. The desert is very boring and this is very bad. Because, if something is boring, my little brothers are going to complain and, if somebody complains, we're going to have to play the Jankowski road trip car game.

Our car game is different than your family road trip game. When somebody can see a license plate number, they read out the digits that are on it and we have to prime factor it as fast as possible. Whoever's fastest wins.

For example, 1,001 is not prime. 7, 11 and 13 multiplied together is 1,001. That's my little brothers’ and my age. It's the only time I beat my dad. Suck it, Dad.

But I'm afraid of this game because my dad always wins besides 1,001. He's going to use it as justification to take away my Game Boy or to make sure that my brothers and I can't watch TV when we get to the hotel room. The stakes are real.

Eric Jankowski shares his story at Stueckle Sky Center, Double R Ranch Club Room at Boise State University in November 2022. Photo by Mark VanderSys.

A consequence of playing the Jankowski Prime Factoring game, though, is that I'm pretty decent on the local math competition scene. And I get accepted to the Michigan Math Scholars Program. It's this math camp where faculty from university are the instructors. They're incredible. They show us how to use binary to win these logic games and they show us how to play chess on a torus and they prove two different sizes of infinity.

For the first time, doing math feels infinitely good. The bigger one. Because it's the first time I can do math without being afraid.

It's at this camp that I decide that I want to be a teacher. I want to be a professor because I see how these professors can take students into their lives, strangers, and show them that they can learn and grow beyond the capacity they thought they had in themselves.

I go to graduate school, I get my PhD and I'm finally a postdoc. I'm one step away from becoming a professor and it is amazing. I'm programming graphics processing units with code that we're writing in teams to discover new materials that we're going to use to solve the climate crisis. I'm getting paid to do it.

The pay is not exactly amazing. That's one downside. The commute is also not perfect. I've got a bike ride then a bus trip then a bike ride to get to CU Boulder and it takes two hours each way.

The other thing that's not ideal about this postdoc is I'm always being interrupted by grad students who are crying. It's very confusing because our lab is amazing. My advisor is incredible. She's super enthusiastic. She's this tiny Indian woman. We connect around elevated vegetarian cuisine and she confides in me about the bad faculty in the department who are always undermining her at the department meetings or telling her that the research that she does isn't real science because it's computer simulations.

We built this lab that is full of diverse students from all sorts of different backgrounds and we're in the lab together all of the time and it's incredible.

And my advisor, she gets me. Like when I have broken both of my wife’s arms, she gives me the day off. Sorry. My wife has two arms and I've broken both of them. I do not have two wives.

We have just moved to Colorado and the Rocky Mountains are right there. I snowboard and she doesn't snowboard so we need to take advantage of this thing that we can do together. I'm teaching her to how to snowboard and she's linking our turns together. The only problem was that we violated this important law of physics which is one spouse teaching another spouse their hobby without having an argument. And so, consequently, physics wins and she breaks both of her wrists.

The important things here are, one, I'm an excellent snowboarding teacher. Two, that my wife has two broken arms and I have to cook for her and feed her. And three, that my advisor gets me.

So when these graduate students are interrupting me with my programming and I turn around and I see one of them and they're like, “Eric, I feel like I'm being pitted against the other students in the lab. I'm really stressed out and I want to quit.”

Or that the student with the NSF graduate fellowship feels like they're being pushed through the weekends. They're too stressed out and they want to leave.

I feel like I don't have time for this. I'm supposed to be publishing papers and getting a job as a professor. So if these students are too afraid to talk to the advisor, I can do this.

So I'm going to go walk down to my advisor's office and I'm going to open their door, sit down at their desk and I'm going to explain that like the lab is feeling really combative and the students feel pitted against each other. And if we just made it a little bit more collaborative then everything's going to be better and we're going to be publishing a lot more papers and everyone's going to be happier. Everyone's going to be getting what they wanted.

Eric's Postdoc Desk

The bike that ferried the bees onto the bus.

But when I do that, my advisor stands up over the desk that's between us, gets in my face and says, “Do you want me to end this job tomorrow? You don't tell me how to do my job.”

And I freeze. I'm hot inside. I stammer, “Okay, I understand.”

I back out of there and I get on my bike and I start riding home.

And when I say that I understand, I do and I don't. I don't understand why I feel like I've just lost the prime factoring game but it feels bad. And I do understand that I need this job and it might be gone tomorrow and I'm afraid. I'm afraid that I've just wasted the last 12 years of my training because, to become a professor, you need your letters of recommendation from your advisors and mine has just evaporated.

As I'm pedaling, I see the bus, the express bus at the Table Mesa bus stop lurch forward. If I miss it, I'm going to be late for making dinner and it'll be another two‑hour wait for my zero‑armed wife.

So I start sprinting. And as I'm sprinting, there's these little pebbles that are hitting me. This doesn't make sense because I've got a fender on the front of my bike and it's supposed to be there. I look down and it's there.

And the pebbles are hitting my arms and they're hitting my face. As I inspect my arms, I realize that these pebbles are moving. I am sprinting through a swarm of bees.

I don't have time for this, so I sprint in front of the bus and I wave at the bus driver to stop and let me on. Thankfully, he stops but there's no room for my bike on the rack on the front of the bus and the cargo bays underneath the bus are all full.

Now, I'm really worried because I know the rules. I know that the bus driver can elect to leave without me or he can show me some compassion and he can fold up a seat on the bus where the wheelchair is attached. I can bring my bike onto the bus.

Thankfully, he lets me on and I'm so relieved.

So right when the bus leaves, the air hisses out of the air brakes. This is the noise that wakes up all of the bees that have been covering me and my bicycle. It is pandemonium. I feel like Oprah giving out cars, like, “You get a bee and you get a bee and you get a bee.”

And children are crying and parents are screaming and there's bees flying everywhere. The bus driver is pawing at the little slidey windows to try to open the windows and let the bees out of the window, but he proves to us that those windows are just decoration and even the experts can't open the slidey windows.

Finally, he gets the door open and the bees leave and I am so relieved.

I'm not kicked off the bus. My fellow passengers let me stay. And I just wish that I can feel the same relief with my boss, that our moment of terror turns into nervous laughter and some common understanding.

I think about how ridiculous the situation was. How did I end up in this situation? It makes me reflect on some privileges that I had taken for granted to get to that point. It was a privilege to be able to ignore this swarm of bees because I didn't have to worry about being allergic and going to the hospital. And I could expect to ride in front of a bus driver and that they wouldn't run me over. That talking with them would let me get onto the bus.

I highly recommend being a part‑Asian part‑white guy in engineering and just showing up at rooms and people believing everything that you say.

I expected to be able to walk into my advisor's office and for her to believe what I had to say, but I realized that when I did that, thinking back to all the times that she'd been undermined in the department meetings, that when I walked in I had released the bees and she was allergic.

I just wanted us to be able to talk without that fear and maybe would be able to support our students authentically in a way where they could grow beyond the capacity that we all thought that they had.

Now, as a tenured professor, it feels more urgent than ever to use the privileges that we have so that we can learn, grow and work together without being afraid.

Thank you.

Part 2

It was one of my first assignments. I was 22, a brand new science journalist fresh out of college with my first ever job. I remember getting out of the car and trying to smooth out the creases in my creased button down thinking that the least I could do was look professional even if I had no idea what I was doing.

I'd been sent to write about these gadgets that were being installed in older people's homes. One went under the pillow to measure how many hours a night you were sleeping. One went on your fridge to measure how much you were eating in a day. One went on your toilet to measure how many times you were flushing. And, together, they were to paint a kind of portrait in data.

This algorithm would figure out your baselines, your daily rhythms, and then if you deviated from that, a message would ping onto a nurse's phone and she would call you to make sure that everything was okay. The thinking was that maybe this algorithm would know something was wrong before even you did and that might keep you out of the hospital.

Eric Boodman shares his story at Turtle Swamp Brewery in Boston, MA in November 2022. Photo by Kate Flock.

The person I was there to visit was my grandmother's age and she didn't actually want these gadgets. What she really wanted was for someone to call her every day. She was worried that she was going to die and nobody would notice and that she'd just be lying there on the floor until the neighbors noticed the smell. But the health agency didn't have that kind of staffing so, instead, she got gadgets.

I was kind of nervous. It's pretty intimate to ask someone to show you under their pillow and their toilet and inside their fridge, but she was only too happy to have me there. In some ways, I was like this ideal grandchild asking follow‑up questions whenever she talked about her aches and pains.

And then right at the end of the interview, she said, “Hey, wait a second. What do I get out of all this? Aren't you gonna pay me?”

And I said, “No, I'm sorry. We're not allowed to pay you, but I can take people out for lunch.”

She said, “Okay. Why don't you come back and take me out for lunch?”

So, the next week I drove the hour‑and‑a‑half back out. I helped her up the driveway. I put her walker in the back of my car and she directed me to a suburban steakhouse in a strip mall. She ordered ribs and mashed potatoes and told me her life story.

She'd grown up in a Quebecois family or a Franco‑American family in Massachusetts who'd come down during what's known as, kind of dramatically, the Great Hemorrhage or like “la grande saignée” when Quebec was “hemorrhaging” workers to the factories in New England.

I'd grown up in Montreal and it felt weirdly like I was just sitting with a friend, you know, switching back and forth between French and English.

[00:03:01 foreign language]

It's an accent that I associate with people who had nuns as teachers, but that's kind of an aside.

She actually had become a nun herself and then left the convent to get married only for her husband to die one year after they'd gotten married.

Anyway, a whole life story cannot fit into one lunch and so she said, “Why don't you come back and take me out for lunch again?”

So, a few weeks later I drove the hour‑and‑a‑half back out, I helped her up the driveway, put her walker in the back of my car, she directed me to the same steakhouse. She ordered the ribs and the mashed potatoes. By now, my article had come out and it had nothing from our first lunch in it. My editors weren't actually that interested in the way that Quebec had hemorrhaged workers. They were interested in the gadgets, so that's what the piece was about.

And she picked up where she left off. She told me about how her mother had died in childbirth and how she and her two sisters had been split up and grew up in the houses of relatives and how they never really quite felt at home. I'm not sure if it was at this visit or another one that she began to tell me about the violence that she'd experienced as a child.

She remembered it in great detail and she told me how it started, how it became a pattern, how it made her feel like there was no one in the world that she could trust.

I did the only thing I knew how to do, I listened. I took careful notes. I ran out of pages in my notebook and ended up writing on the back of a paper menu. At some point, I started to realize that I was getting pretty upset. And I didn't think I could start to cry in the middle of an interview. This was about her. I was just the receptacle.

So I told her I needed to go to the bathroom. And I remember just standing there sobbing in the stall. I thought, “What am I doing here in this suburban steakhouse crying in the bathroom with this commercial country running and just playing at therapy with this old lady who needs a lot more help than I can give her?”

I don't remember exactly how many times I went back but what I do remember are the calls where she began to call me every day. The less responsive I was, the more she called. She started calling me her boyfriend. She knitted me a blanket. She sent me Valentines and I didn't know what to do. I remember my phone just buzzing on my desk and my whole body just kind of tightening up with dread.

Eventually, I just stopped responding altogether. And I remember she just kept calling and calling and calling and calling and calling and calling until, at some point, she stopped. In a way, I feel like this whole story is a kind of apology. I wish that I'd written to her and told her I couldn't keep this up.

And I guess it's kind of a cautionary tale for me about not making tacit promises during interviews. You know, I can't be your grandson. I can't be your friend. I can't promise that you're going to like what I write about you. I can't even promise that I'm going to write about you at all.

It's funny, because no matter how many stories I nail, no matter how many hard interviews I do that go beautifully, this is the one I remember most. There's something about regret that just sticks with you more than anything else.

But, in a way, it also tells you about what journalism can do. Here was this person who'd been offered the fanciest that computer scientists could give her. She had all these gadgets all over her house. She had data scientists analyzing how many times she flushed her toilet. But what she really needed was someone to talk to. That was something I could give her, at least for a little while.

Thank you.