From bizarre job requirements to downright horrible bosses, sometimes our jobs just don’t fit. In this week’s episode, both our storytellers share stories about what happens when work doesn’t work.

Part 1: When fertility research scientist Sarah Adelman gets a job at a sperm bank, she’s apparently the only one who finds it funny.

Sarah Adelman is a born and bred New Yorker, former fertility research scientist, and stand up comedian. She performs regularly at all the top NYC comedy clubs and independent shows, can be seen on two episodes of HBO Game Theory and has over 35,000 followers across her platforms . Her content has been featured on The Today Show, NBC News, Meta, the 92nd Street Y, and more. Sarah graduated Cum Laude from Dartmouth College in 2019 and earned her Masters of Public Health from Columbia University in 2021. She trained as a research scientist in NYC where she studied fertility and ran human subjects trials at a sperm bank. Her one hour comedy solo show, EGG, brings audiences through her hilarious and heartfelt coming-of-age journey to her present-day career in science, the day-to-day of studying male reproduction, why she started comedy, and culminates in an earth-shattering clash of her two worlds. EGG premires in June 2024.

Part 2: In her new job at a neuroscience lab, Anna Zhukovskaya’s boss starts to pick on her.

Anna Zhukovskaya is a neuroscientist studying the role of somatosensation in social behavior and its effects on stress. She is currently doing a postdoc in the Abdus-Sabor lab in Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute. She did her PhD at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute in Ilana Witten's lab.

Episode Transcript

Part 1

For a long time, I had every little girl's dream job, professionally studying semen.

I did work at a sperm bank, which was great. I will never forget my first day of work when a scientist, a lab tech at my lab asked if I wanted to look down into a Petri dish of millions of little sperms wiggling around. I was like, “Wow! Already? It's 9:08 AM. Okay. I just got here. It's my first. Like, who's like sperm is this? Is he hot? Like what's the vibe? What's going on?”

It was my first day, okay. My first day of work. They're like "Here's your sexual harassment packet, and the come is on your desk.”

And I'm not one to say no to a little no‑strings‑attached moment, so I looked down through that microscope into this Petri dish and saw millions of little spermies wiggling around. And my eyes widened when I saw these creatures flopping furiously looking for direction and meaning and attention. They seemed to be screaming, "Pick me, choose me, love me."

They reminded me a bit of myself. They had that anxious, nervous, vaguely disgusting vibe I feel like I've always had. I looked down into that Petri dish and saw the needy, attention‑starved 10‑year‑old girl I'd been, looking up at me with these pleading eyes.

Now, before we go any further, I just want to say I was qualified to be a men's fertility scientist. I didn't just waltz into this sperm bank one day. Don't do that. It wasn't my original or intended field of research, but the road to semen analysis is long and winding.

I have been studying semen recreationally for years before I was paid for it, pro bono, freelance, off the clock. But I was very qualified to. I have a bachelor's in Medical Sociology, I have a master's in Public Health. I was there for a reason.

But women's health was my first original passion. I'd always been interested in medicine. Guess how many limbs my American Girl doll had when I was done with her? None, okay? I whittled Kit Kittredge down until she was nothing but torso.

When I was around seven, a baby was born in a taxi outside my parents' apartment on the Upper West side of New York. Yes, I saw a finance bro come into this world. And I remember standing up from the couch and running over to the window, and my nose pressed against the glass and all of the resiliency and strength of the female body, the ability to create life out of nothing. My parents were much more concerned about this, like, bringing down the real estate value of the block. They did not want to engage but I was going to the kitchen looking for a hose and rubber gloves to help the medics clean the afterbirth off the sidewalk.

Then when my favorite character Sybil in Downton Abbey died in childbirth in the first season, I see we have some Sybil heads in the house here. Thank you. Rock on! I became fixated on maternal mortality and prenatal health and I decided that I wanted a career in medicine.

And I'm sure you're all thinking, "Wow, Sarah is a really good altruistic person," and you would be right. But there was a more pressing reason I wanted to pursue a career in science. To feel in control of my destiny. It wasn't enough for me to approach my life as a scientist, I needed to become a scientist.

We all know careers in science follow this gorgeous clear template. It gets you on this conveyor belt that if you just hop on and hang tight, you'll have a good life. Bachelor's, master's, mental breakdown. Research, PhD, started dissertation. Ignore all published research that disproves your dissertation. Graduate, postdoc, research mental breakdown, retirement. Beautiful.

All I want to do is follow steps, okay? Anything inside the Pandora's box of the future is terrifying to me. If being a control freak was a rash, I'd be covered in red blotches, only helped by color‑coded calendars and checklists.

In the real world, it's so hard to tell what's a signal and what's noise. Is the person I'm dating my soulmate? How do I know if I'm ready to have kids? Should I quit my day job? Are my parents terrible people?

But in science, you play God. Science is all about controlling X to see the effect on Y, taking confusing findings and summarizing them into tables and figures. It's all right there. It's all black and white. You can't argue with a P value.

And my type A personality, while it helped me in so many, did paralyze me in others. Like as a kid I would freak out if anyone was more than five minutes late to pick me up from school. My fingers would bleed from making so many multiplication table flashcards. I still have the callus. I would go to the bathroom during class and do jumping jacks, because I'd learned in biology that if you had oxygen increase to the brain, it could help with memorization.

And that was cool but it was also, like, a lot. I felt like I was in this pressure cooker, breaking down from the heat of my own temperature.

This obsession with validation and getting people to like me and needing to be good at things, this impacted every area of my life, my relationships with my friends, with my parents, with my teachers. I wouldn't take the day off of school for parent‑teacher conferences. I would go to my own parent‑teacher conferences because I wanted to hear that I was doing a good job.

Of course, when I hit puberty, this went into the male attention sphere, the sort of relishing of the male gaze. I became obsessed. I don't know why I'd never been particularly lucky in love as much as I'd wanted to be. I had my heart broken in preschool when my first boyfriend, also in preschool, did dump me. Instead of just accepting this like a normal child, I took a Polaroid we had of us together and carried it around in a Ziploc bag, like a purse, for weeks until my teacher was like, “Are you okay?”

Then I got a bit older. No one wanted to date me in elementary school, so I went looking for a boyfriend on Club Penguin. Do you guys remember Club Penguin? Little video game, 2000s, chat with other penguins all over the world, unmonitored.

I was trying to find a boyfriend so hard on Club Penguin that my account was removed under suspicion of pedophilia. I swear to God. Because every penguin in this igloo is like, "Hey, who likes hot chocolate?" You know? And I was in there like, "Who in this igloo is between the ages of 9 and 11, lives within driving distance of this address, is a male? Send multiple photos.”

The account was never recovered.

So, yeah, I took the job at the sperm bank. I'm taking the job at the sperm bank, which was cool and I was good at it and I liked that I was publishing and I was doing real research. I was actually helping people. But the longer I was there, the more I realized I was the only one working at a sperm bank who thought that was funny.

And my co, we just weren't jiving. I had to keep this poker face on all the time and pretend that pipetting and analyzing jizz – Excuse me. Seminal ejaculate fluid – was very serious, very serious indeed. They'd be like, “Sarah, semen is not funny.” And I'd be like, “Well, depends where it lands.” You know what I mean?

Anyway, I just kept going to work, feeling more and more frustrated every day until I was doing this background research for a paper on oxidative stress and semen quality. Don't worry about it.

When I came across this article detailing scientists have recently found that that age‑old story we learn in sex ed, you guys all know it, right? This stream of like valiant and heroic sperms, knights in shining armor, beelining for the egg with this one winner penetrating her, that's all incorrect. In recent decades, research has actually shown that, through chemical communications in utero, it is the egg who chooses sperm, not the other way around.

Eggs secrete chemicals that guide and attract the sperm to her and send them into hyperactivity in a process called chemokinesis. Sperm don't even know where to swim. If they go into an empty uterus, they just go around in circles, hitting walls, hitting each other, little guys driving around, refusing to ask for directions.

And then, not some winning sperm, some special boy gets to the egg first, but millions surround her at the same time. The egg regally sits back, considers them, and chooses one singular sperm to enter the outer membrane. And after making her choice, she puts up this forcefield. Think like Violet’s from The Incredibles, and fertilization begins.

I'm in the lab. I'm in my chair and I'm looking at this image on my desktop, at those sperm that I had really identified with two years earlier on my first day of work when I'd seen them in the Petri dish and how much I had been feeling like that my whole life. Hell, if I just swam hard enough and fast enough and aggressively enough towards this big bright light, whatever that was, then I would win and I would get the diploma and the guy and the award. I would be that special one who won and who was chosen.

But now that I knew how it worked, it looked so desperate to me. Like, “Ugh, pathetic.” Pinheads, double tails, half of you guys are going to end up in socks anyway. Nothing like the bright wholeness of the egg.

And the sperm was like a fleck of dust next to her. I looked at all of them and thought that they were idiots, but also that I'd been the idiot for thinking I was doing the right thing by trying to be in this mad dash to God knows where, making my happiness dependent on being the first to arrive. I couldn't have won this race. The race didn't even exist. It was all in my head.

But this egg, this star, this magnetic force who drew everything to her, she wasn't waiting to be chosen. She wasn't making her happiness dependent on the validation of other people. She was patient and relaxed and focused on what she wanted. She trusted that things would work out. She was this big, bright light.

I wanted to know what I wanted, like for real, like what I wanted, not what would impress other people, which would make me happy. What would happen if I just dipped my toe in the deep end of life a little bit and trusted that things would work out?

So I did a couple of experiments. I went on a bumble date with a guy I would have never said yes to in a million years. He didn't have some fancy corporate job or go to an Ivy League school and he didn't wear a vest. He was in some underground experimental music band who he lived with. We went on a first date and it went really well. I live with that guy and we've been together for four years. I know. Love.

Okay. This is about me.

I did something that I always wanted to do so badly in my life and just had never had the courage to. I went to a stand‑up comedy open mic. And that went well. I mean, it didn't go well, but I liked it. I started getting better and the open mics turned into shows, and the shows turned into better shows. I started talking about my job on stage and what it was like working at a sperm bank.

Side note, a video of me talking about working at a sperm bank did wind up in the hands of my prestigious hospital lab’s Human Resources Department, who did make me watch an entire 10‑minutes set in front of a team of lawyers and did promptly fire me, but that's not what the story is about. That's a different story.

This story is about the next day, when I woke up for the first time in my life with nowhere to be. I hadn't taken a quick detour off my path. I'd been forcibly thrown off the conveyor belt. I'd gotten on the moment that I saw the woman give birth in the cab when I was seven. I felt untethered and free‑falling, and I hated it.

I went to a coffee shop with all the other unemployed Brooklynites and edited my resume. When I was done, I looked at it. Everything I've ever been condensed into this one‑sheet PDF, into my own life in bullet points and it looked almost pathetic then, looking back on me.

I scrolled through all the research science job openings and the upcoming PhD cycles and I was qualified for all of them. But my mouse hovered over every apply button, never clicking. Did I really want to do it all over again? Now that I'd seen the light, seen the other side, I wasn't sure if I could go back the other way.

And even though it was messy and chaotic and unpredictable, comedy made me feel like a big, bright sun. And while you couldn't control how much stage time you got or if someone heckled you, or a million things, I wanted to be there. I wanted to be in that fiery pit of hell with all the other comedians screaming my head off.

So I guess I thought if I could have become a scientist, I could just be a scientist of my own life. Another way to pull my own marionette strings from above, but no one can control their own life, not even me. I think I was just some test subject all along, accidentally disproving my own hypothesis.

So, I clicked out of my 57 open job tabs, some things never change. I figured I'd give myself a week to think about science, to think about comedy, to think about the plan or if I needed a plan, and that was over a year ago. My life now looks nothing like I thought it would and that's okay. I do comedy every night, I have a day job where I don't have to touch urine. And it's not the plan but it's better than the plan, because I let go of the plan. Well, I got fired, but I accepted being fired. That's progress, right?

Of course, I still have that sperm side to me, you know, desperately seeking approval, anxious for people to like me. I'm a comedian. How much more self‑indulgent can you get? But it's getting less intense. I think it's because I'm coming into the egg, full of potential, ready with new life, ready to crack open. It's because I'm not trying to make anyone else happy.

I know I can look at all my choices now, not just the choices I think are right or the choices that get to me first, but all the choices, and that I'll pick well, no matter what I choose. And even though I was fired, and it sucked, it helped me to see the world beyond a Petri dish and my own place in it.

Thanks so much, guys.

Part 2

The new job started out great. I remember being really excited, counting down the days until my start date. The week before, I went shopping for a new lab notebook, like a kid getting ready for the new school year.

The lab was really big and had a lot of other technicians and I was happy to make new friends. I was also really eager to make a good impression on Tina, the postdoc that I'd be working with. She was really cool. She was funny and outgoing and she seemed like someone you'd want to be friends with. She's also a neuroscientist, which is what I wanted to be. I was hoping that I could learn from her.

But there was another big reason that I wanted Tina to support me. I was hoping that when I reapplied to grad school, that my experience working for her would help me get in.

I had applied previously the year before. I'd gotten interviews but, ultimately, I did not get in anywhere. I was devastated at first but I was not willing to give up. Once I decided to be a neuroscientist, I was willing to do whatever I had to do and apply as many times as I needed to until I got in.

I knew that my previous application had failed because I didn't have experience working in a neuroscience lab and so this experience working with Tina was a huge opportunity for me.

We initially got along fine. She was really smart and a talented scientist and I was learning a lot from her, like how to write a good grant application, how to thoughtfully design an experiment to test her hypothesis.

I tried really hard to be a good technician. If I made a mistake, I was careful to learn from it and to not repeat it again.

One time, we journal clubbed a paper together and she asked me questions about what the results and the figures meant, why they did certain experiments, but I couldn't answer her questions because I hadn't read the paper carefully. She didn't get mad, but I felt like I didn't put enough effort in. So the next time we read a paper together, I was careful to read it really closely.

This time, I was able to answer all her questions and she commended me on my improvement. I was really happy. I felt like I had learned something and she seemed to notice that I was making an effort.

I don't remember when things started to change but, one day, maybe eight months or so after I started, I was sitting in the conference room with some of the other technicians. We were chatting and I was working on my laptop. I don't remember what I was working on. It was something like editing images that I had taken on the microscope or maybe organizing some data. Nothing at all that cognitively demanding.

When Tina walked by and saw me, she came in and asked me what I was working on. I told her and I thought she'd asked me to help her with something, but instead, she said in front of everyone, "How can you be getting any work done when you're talking all the time and laughing every five minutes?"

I was shocked. I felt awful, like she had caught me slogging off or something, even though I was literally doing work at the time. I had never seen any of the other technicians get reprimanded by the postdocs they worked with. I trusted Tina, so I thought I'd really messed up.

But her criticism of me got more and more frequent. She never complained that I didn't get work done or that I was making too many mistakes. It was all focused on things like my excessive socializing, how I couldn't sit still while reading a paper or how I was too eager to get free food at the lunchtime talks, or how she never heard me talking about science.

One time, I was having a conversation with her and another postdoc. We were talking about nepotism in science and I told a story about how it was really hard for me to get my previous job in a cancer lab because I didn't know someone who knew someone.

Tina turned to me and said, "But you only got this job because the technician put in a good word for you."

I thought that I had impressed her when I interviewed and that she saw potential in me, so that was really embarrassing and hurtful to hear.

When Tina started to dislike me, I didn’t say anything to anyone at first. I felt like I was a bad technician and I became worried about what would happen when I applied to grad school.

The lab was really big, so even though she wasn't the one who would write the recommendation letter for me, the technicians didn't get much one‑on‑one time with the PI and I was worried that she would say something bad about me and that it would hurt my career. I felt embarrassed that I wasn't doing a good job.

There were definitely times when I wondered if she was right. If I made a mistake or I forgot something, I thought it's because I'm not cut out to be a scientist. After all, I was really struggling to get into grad school, maybe I just wasn't good enough.

Eventually, I really needed to tell someone that. Because I felt so bad about it, I mentioned what was happening to another technician.

She said, “Oh, Tina always has someone she hates. She'll move on to someone else soon. Don't worry.”

That did make me feel better. I felt validated that she was just picking on me, so I started to avoid her and tried not to be around her unless it was absolutely necessary.

After a few months of this, I hit the one‑year mark at the lab. It was the summer before I applied to grad school again and a few of the other technicians and I were taking an Intro to Coding class at the recommendation of another postdoc in the lab.

At the end of the class, there was a final exam and we spent a day or two before the test, studying for it in the library in the lobby of our building. I was worried that if Tina didn't see me around for a day or two that she would get annoyed, but I decided that the test was more important.

I managed to avoid her the day of the exam, but the next day I had to ask her some questions about an experiment. I walked over to the room where she was in with a sense of dread. The lab was split into different rooms, each of which had benches with bays at the end of them where the postdocs and grad students sat. The room that Tina was in had three other postdocs and one grad student, and most of them were in the room when I came in to talk to her.

I walked over to her, and I asked her a question about our project. She answered me but then she said, "I tried to find you earlier and I couldn't. Where have you been all week? Have you been coming in?"

I told her that I was studying for this exam with some of the other techs in the class, but that didn't matter to her. She said that it was obvious that all I cared about was socializing and having fun.

Then she said, "It's clear that you don't care about science and I don't think you deserve to go to grad school.”

That made me really mad.

At this point, I had spent years struggling to get into a PhD program. Who was she to tell me that I didn't deserve it just because I didn't fit her idea of a future scientist?

I tried to argue with her and defend myself, but the conversation ended with her telling me that she wasn't going to put effort into mentoring me anymore.

I walked out of the room shaking from the adrenaline. I could have guessed that she had this opinion of me, but I was still shocked that she went as far as to say all that.

Maybe 30 minutes later, I was walking down the hallway outside the lab space when, to my surprise, Joy, one of the grad students who was in the room at the time, came up to me and said, "I don't know what her problem is, but don't listen to her."

I had barely interacted with Joy in the year that I'd been there, so I knew that she wasn't just saying that to be nice, and that made it all the more meaningful to me.

Then, not long after that, Priya, one of the postdocs who was also in the room at time that I also didn't know very well, came up to me and told me that she couldn't believe that Tina said all that and that she must have just been in one of her bad moods. I don't know if either of them remembered saying that to me, but It really meant a lot to me at the time. I still think about it sometimes.

I had gotten used to Tina's dislike of me by then, but it still hurt a lot to hear her say that I didn't deserve to go to grad school, especially when I had struggled to get to the place where I was and I didn't know if I was going to be successful.

That wasn't the first time that someone told me I wasn't cut out for science and it wouldn't be the last. I didn't let it stop me from going to grad school or make me give up when things got hard, as they often do in science. Now that I'm at the stage that Tina was at when I worked with her, I think a lot about how I can be a good mentor and encourage people rather than tearing them down.

A couple years ago, one of the postdocs I knew from a different lab, who is now junior faculty, reached out to me and asked me if I knew Tina, if I had overlapped with her when I was a technician and what my take on her was. I had heard the grapevine that Tina was on the job market and I correctly guessed that this person was on the hiring committee and was considering her application.

I went back and forth on what to say. Revealing the truth about how she treated me when I worked with her could tank her application, but it was also the truth and it said a lot about the kind of mentor she would be to potential future grad students.

But in the end, I decided to take the high road. I said that Tina was a great scientist and I talked about all the positive things I had learned from her.

She ended up getting that job. I like to think it has a little something to do with a technician putting in a good word for her.