As part of my duties at the university, I work for a few hours a week for a lab in the department. My lab is a pretty large one: it's run by a professor who is very interested in research, so we have lots of projects going on and lots of graduate students who are involved in running things. Every week, we all meet for an hour to discuss how things are going with our various projects. Lately, the professor has been assigning articles for us to read at home so that we can talk about them during the meetings and think about their implications for our experiments.

I take my duties pretty seriously, so I always take the time to do the assigned readings, ever so tedious as they may be. Most of my labmates do not necessarily have the same outlook. They usually ask me to summarize the articles for them before our meetings. And I do. Because if I don't, we'll have nothing to talk about during the meeting, and it will be super boring and awkward.

Last week when we were talking about the articles, the supervising professor was tiptoeing around things, acting as if he hadn't read them either. Later he said flat out, "I didn't actually get around to reading this article this week. I had a lot going on. Could someone summarize it for me?" As you might have guessed, all heads turned expectantly in my direction. As it turns out, one is the loneliest number.

I feel like I should be getting a bump in pay.