Feeling isolated in her new job as a particle accelerator operator at Fermilab, Cindy Joe finds comfort in the friendship of her unconventional pet.

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Cindy Joe is an engineering physicist working with several of Fermilab’s experiments studying neutrinos, tiny particles that might hold the answers to some of the universe’s biggest mysteries. A first-generation college student, she grew up dreaming big in the back of her family’s Chinese restaurant in a small town in Arkansas. While obtaining her bachelor’s degree in physics, she also became a licensed senior reactor operator at Reed College’s nuclear research reactor. She then moved to even bigger machines, working as a particle accelerator operator in Fermilab’s Main Control Room for seven years. Cindy is deeply passionate about science outreach, and has spoken to audiences from elementary school to members of Congress. A 2-time presenter at Fermilab’s Physics Slam and a contributor to PechaKucha Night Batavia, she currently lectures in Fermilab’s Saturday Morning Physics program for high school students.

This story originally aired on July 27, 2018 in an episode titled “Loneliness: Stories about finding friends”.

Story Transcript

When I was just out of college, I had a pet snail.  This was when I was still living in Portland, Oregon.  I had bought a box of strawberries from a fruit stand in a hurry and I hadn’t noticed until I got home that there was a little hitchhiker inside.  So I decided to keep him.  I named him Professor Snailworthy. 

What I didn’t realize until I had one was how much personality snails have.  He had favorite foods.  He'd hide in his shell when his cage got too dirty.  (Very fastidious.)  He loved to sit in his water dish.  And eventually, he outgrew the strawberry box and a friend bought him a terrarium to live in. He would crawl up to the lid and sort of stick there by suction, hanging upside down like a bat. 

Well, needless to say, I absolutely doted on the little guy.  Whenever I'd go on trips, I would get him a snail sitter.  We would go on outings to the park.  We’d go by bus.  Sometimes I'd get kind of strange looks, but not that many, because it was Portland. 

So we’d get off the bus at the park and I would open the lid of his cage and let him out onto the grass, to sort of taste the grasses of freedom…feel the wind in his eyestalks.  At some point I would scoop him back in and we would go home. 

Well, Professor Snailworthy grew, and I think he thrived.  He grew from a size that I hadn’t noticed in a strawberry box to maybe three to four inches long from nose to tail, with a shell the size of a key lime.  Wow, right? 

And I came up with this whole imaginary backstory in which maybe he would just not stop growing.  He would just keep growing and growing and growing until one day he would get so big that he would break out of the backyard and go exploring.  And maybe people would think that he was a monster rampaging the city, and they would get scared…until I showed up.  And he would remember that I had loved and taken care of him and he would let me take him home. 

I even sort of drew little draft sketches for a comic.  Just remember that you heard it here first.  And Hollywood, I'll be waiting to hear from you about movie options. 

Well, during this time I moved from Portland to the Chicago suburbs.  Of course, Professor Snailworthy went with me.  I’m kind of a rule follower so I looked up the airlines’ policies on snail transport.  I don't know why, but I couldn’t find any. 

But I didn’t just want to stuff him in my suitcase and hope for the best. So I popped him in my water bottle, put plastic wrap over the top and poked little breathing holes.  I packed him in my backpack and we both boarded the plane to our new life.  I figured if anybody saw his silhouette on the x-ray and asked me any probing questions, I would say that I was a collector of seashells. But nobody asked me any questions. 

So I'd moved out here to Fermilab to become a particle accelerator operator.  So the thing was, I was moving across the country on my own, from my college town which I loved…across the country, to a place where it snowed and I didn’t know anyone.  I didn’t know anyTHING either. 

This job is so unique that they had to train me from the ground up, on the job.  And that meant that I was surrounded by the world’s experts and I was asking them what felt like incredibly stupid questions.  The whole time I’m sort of battling to tamp down that part of my ego that needs to prove that I’m really smart too…so that I can actually be open to all the new things that I need to learn. Which is basically every single part of every single machine. 

And the thing about the accelerators is they also operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so everybody works a rotating shift schedule.  You know, days, evenings, weekends, holidays, all of it.  So it’s actually pretty tough to make outside friends.  It’s a pretty tough lifestyle, especially when you're spending up to sixty hours a week at work.  

At first, I thought I might bond with my fellow operators, but I didn’t really fit in.  After a while, I started to feel invisible.  I'd hear about what a good time everyone else was having at the activities that I hadn’t actually been invited to.  Or when I brought up wanting to participate in a project, I'd be told they were already done, thanks. 

I'd bring up my ideas but sometimes I'd feel completely overrun, like nobody was really listening to me at all, even in some situations where I was the one who was supposed to be in charge.  I didn’t really think they were doing it on purpose, exactly, but I felt forgotten.  And, to be honest, that isn’t really a better feeling.  

There could sometimes be periods of four or five days in a row in which I would maybe have no real-life contact with other human beings, and that was a really tough time. 

Well, I'd graduated into, unfortunately, the worst part of the recession.  So I didn’t really feel like I could just leave, because of a small thing like feeling really unhappy.  Lots of people were genuinely worse off.  And besides, I was kind of worried that maybe it was my fault that people didn’t like me, because I wasn’t likeable.  They didn’t believe the things I said because I wasn’t knowledgeable.  And they didn’t listen to me because I wasn’t worth listening to.

Well, there were a few things that kept me going in this period.  One was my personal stubbornness; and another was my fundamental belief in the value of what I was doing.  I was so in love with physics.  I felt like I was in a unique position.  I had access on the ground level to… I was on the ground level of big science and I had a level of access a few people on the planet had.  And that some of the great discoveries of physics were due, in small part, to my training and experience and my knowledge.  And that maybe humanity would know more about the vast universe around us because I was working hard and really devoted to my job. 

Late at night when everything was running smoothly and there was a sort of humming and beeping and buzzing, I felt a sense of peace and of the rightness of things.  Whenever I adjusted the machines all shift and I got a three percent increase in output, I felt proud.  Whenever there were big discoveries announced, and somebody got the Nobel Prize, and that was partly because of contributions from experiments here at Fermilab…which worked because of the work that I and my co-workers were doing, I felt like it was almost as if maybe one-millionth of that Nobel Prize was mine. 

This had been what I had been wanting to discover when I moved out here, if this was something that I could devote my life to.  And the answer felt like yes. 

In retrospect, what I had been looking for was some type of validation.  I wanted somebody else to notice me and tell me that I was good enough.  And the stakes had been built up so high that it became all I thought about.  If there's anything that scientists are good at, it is taking in data and drawing their own conclusions from it.  And based upon the input I was getting, I had concluded that I must not belong there. 

But in my loneliest periods there was one living, moving creature around.  And as far as Professor Snailworthy was concerned, the sun rose and set on me…and my mango scraps.  At some point, maybe with his help, I realized that my core beliefs that every single person mattered and had fundamental, inherent value should maybe also apply…to myself.  That my different perspective was important.  That my experiences were real, and that my contributions were good.  That I deserved no less gentle kindness and consideration than anyone else, and maybe I should treat myself like it.  That was a shift in mindset that helped pull me out of my funk.

There is this concept in chemistry: the nucleation site.  Conditions can be all ready for solid crystals to form out of a liquid solution, but maybe nothing will happen.  Lots of times nothing will happen, until a seed crystal is introduced.  And I've often thought that friendship works the same way.  That lots of times it’s not until you make one new friend then you meet all their friends and now, hey, you've got twenty new friends. 

That’s what happened to me.  Through that one friend I started meeting other people outside of my bubble and I started making a lot of new friends in my own right.  I still worked a lot of weird hours, and I still worked a lot of weird times, but I started to feel like somebody who mattered again.  Somebody that people would miss if she was gone. 

Well, one day, after we’d been together for about three years, I noticed that the Professor was being a little bit slow.  I mean, he was a snail, but more than usual.  But I was kind of busier now.  I'd started to get known around the department for being good at what I did, so that opened up all kinds of opportunities.  I was doing a lot of outreach, I was serving on committees, I was volunteering for everything I could.  So I didn’t spend as much time with him anymore.  I'd change his water, I'd put in his food, but I didn’t just sort of sit and watch him anymore.  We didn’t spend as much quality time together. 

Then one day, I noticed that he'd been inside of his shell for a while.  He'd never really done that for so long before, so I started to worry that maybe something was seriously wrong.  I sprayed him with water.  I put in his favorite foods.  I actually picked him up and put him in his water dish, but he barely moved.  Eventually, I had to accept that he was gone, and he was never going to come out again. 

I miss my Professor.  If there is such a thing, he was a good snail.  His tenure may not have been long, but he taught me a lot of things about patience, about life.  About being picky about your choices, but happy with the life that you make. 

He taught me to look at things from a different perspective, even if that means that you have to hang upside down for a while.  He taught me to feel the grass under my feet and the wind in my eyestalks.  And he taught me that sometimes it is possible for you to grow, and to change, even if everyone thinks that you are too small. 

He helped me make friends.  (Having a weird pet is a surprisingly great conversation starter.)  And he was the thing that I packed most carefully to take from my old life to my new.  Then, after a while, he taught me how to let go.

Someday, maybe, I will again be the girl with the weird pet.  But I will never get over being grateful that I'd bought that particular box of strawberries, and I will never forget my first snail.  Thank you.