This is My Life......

Angry....... felt so 委屈

I cant believe that a simple feedback email will take me 5 hrs to get it type out.....

Yesterday, my boss found some errors with the results generated by multiple alignment program provided by NCBI(Influenza Virus Resource). Me being a cheap labour of the lab, my boss told me to write a feedback email (on behalf of him) to the NCBI in-charge regarding this problem. He even told me to write it in such a way that it will sound positive and "i'm not blaming you" kind of tone. OK ... fine... Being a Biz Manager for a year, i've written hundreds of such letters or email b4.. thinking that, this will be a chance for me to "show off" my writing skills....

It took me less then half and hour to get everything done. and this was what i've written....

my 1st version:

Then, my boss, being a very "careful" person wanted to double check my work. whatever, fine.... Then he edit abit(1 single paragraph and he took half an hr to edit..) and told me to continue the rest for him. Telling the person, the specific nucleotides positions that had errors... poor me had to spent another half an hour to spot-the-difference in that mess of "A-T-C-G"..

a mess of A-T-C-G

Then I showed him my 2nd version:

Dear Dr. Yiming,

I'm currently working in Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology (IMCB) under Mr. Masafumi. As our research project involves Influenza, we have been using your Influenza Virus Resource database for a considerable period of time. Indeed, your influenza database is very valuable and aids in our project in many aspects.

Recently, when we were using the multiple alignment function installed in the influenza database website, we found some discrepancies between the results done by two different ways.

The two ways compared are one that uses the sequences obtained inside the web page directly and the other method that uses “Add your own sequences” and FASTA for the alignment, so called indirectly. For the indirect method, we create the text file first and then it is sent to your server according to your web page instruction.

It appears to us that the results that came from these two methods are different. We have arranged the set of nucleotide sequences in the same order for both methods. As seen in the attached file, there are a handful of differences generated from the results. For instance, in H1N1, after inputting its nucleotide sequence into the FASTA, the result generated reflects a different beginning sequence (GTAGA…) as compared to the input sequence (AGCAA…).Furthermore, in the same sequence of H1N1, for nucleotide no.165, the indirect method’s result shows a point mutation of nucleotide G, despite the input sequence having nucleotide A. We will also like to draw your attention to nucleotide no. 82 of H3N2. For the indirect method, the result shows a point mutation of A despite the input sequence having nucleotide C for that position.

I have attached a figure on the results we obtained by the above methods and also the FASTA format file which we used for the indirect methods for your reference.

As frequent users of the Influenza Virus Resource database, we like to give a positive feedback of this situation to NCBI. We hope that NCBI can clear this discrepancy for the benefits of the future users of the database.

Best regards,
Wee Sue Yuen

This is when he really pissed me off.... he said that i was too long-winded and "smart" ppl dont have time to read them... i'm was totally speechless... he was the one who told me to be specific then now he said that i'm long-winded.... and the worst thing is that he commented that my english is very lousy(i quoted his exact words)... No choice, i have to sit beside him while he edit my work.. or should i say, typing his own email... finally, he finished "editing" and he told me to read to see if it's ok.. i'm like 'can i say it's not ok...??' Eventually, this is the final version:

Dear Dr. Yiming,

I'm currently working in Institute of Cell and Molecular Biology (IMCB) under Mr. Masafumi. As our research project involves Influenza, we have been using your Influenza Virus Resource database for a considerable period of time. Indeed, your influenza database is very valuable and aids in our project in many aspects.

Recently, we are encountering a problem in the alignment work using your alignment program installed in the influenza database website. We found some discrepancies between the results done by two different ways.

The two ways tested were one that uses the sequences obtained inside the web page and align directly and the other method is to send our text file to your server through “Add your own sequences” for the alignment indirectly.

It appears to us that the results that came from these two methods are different. We have arranged the set of nucleotide sequences in the same order for alignment work to show the differences easily.

As seen in the attached file, there are a handful of differences generated from the results. For instance, in H1N1 (AB286002, AY790268 and CY020278)and H3N2 (AB281194, CY002907 and CY017926) shows strange results, such that the beginning of these sequences are truncated and wrong nucleotides are created even though the input sequences are same as that of consensus sequences (refer to the red box in the attached file). Those are indicated by the red boxes in the attached file.

I also attached the text format file which we used for the indirect methods for your reference just in case if you need to see.

We hope that you can clear this discrepancy for us.

Best regards,
Wee Sue Yuen

My dear readers.. pls tell me if this final version fits the "positive and 'i dont blame u tone"

Then, i thought that my boss might want to send this letter via his own email, since it is his writing plus i dont have an IMCB email account. he told me to send it using my NTU email account.. i'm like wth... you are the one who typed this email and u want to use my name for it... i'm onli an attachment student in your lab... if the person for some reason, becomes pissed off with "my" email.. he will definitely shot back at me and not my boss(who is the actual author of this email)....

Haiz... life is terrible with my current boss... shall end my complaining now and get back to work b4 my boss comes to the office...

20.5 weeks to go....

YueN signing off... sunny morning...