And as his English is still rather unpolished, we only speak in French. It's probably not the best for the development of his skills, going through laborious conversations when you can just speak another language and get done with it is too painful for little impatient me; plus it makes me feel patronizing and which I hate. So French I speak.

But I'm actually annoyed. He suffers from the frustrations that inescapably stem from being faced with another culture, which I obviously understand very well ("why can't they do things like at home?" was probably the sentence I thought the most in my first few weeks in the US); but I am starting to be fed up with the incessant complaining he does.

I know you have to go to one place for food and another one for household items, for there isn't really any big supermarket that offers a large choice in both kind of goods. I know the public transportation system is a sore pain. I know you don't write the date in the same order. It's tiring, and it makes everyday simple tasks way harder than they used to be. But the best you can do? Relax, breathe in, and accept that the system is different. You don't need to like it better than what you know; you just need to take it easy and go with the flow...

And.

Don't fucking come complaining to me that the way we work is crappy.

You are joining a team; it's your job to adapt, not ours. Not that you cannot suggest way of making things differently. But please, give the system a try first.

You don't like using your crappy desktop only as a terminal to log on to more powerful units? Well run things locally on it, nobody is trying to prevent you from doing that, but don't come whining that it takes forever and crashes your weak system. You don't like that Graduate Advisor has many, many people under his supervision, and that it means that the PhD students have to be autonomous instead of accounting for every single one of their days like you did during your own PhD? Well maybe that was something to find out before you decided to come here.

Moreover, we've spent a lot of time making this lab a better place to work in, and I am proud of having be part of the process that allowed for good, friendly work conditions that made everybody's research more efficient. You don't like that we are free to come in whenever we want to, to take it easier during the summer, and to work from home, as long as results are produced? But nobody prevents you from setting your own times; and if you want to come 8 to 5 every day of the week, feel free to do so, I guarantee you that, once everybody will be back from their summer breaks and relaxed schedules, you'll be bound to see everybody at one time or the other, because having no set rules doesn't mean that we're going lose. You don't like that we have what you call "useless" guidelines for code and knowledge maintenance? Well I'd like to give you one of my projects in the state in which it has originally been passed to me by Dr. Asymmetric before we decided to implement these guidelines, and see if you can figure it out by yourself. You're joining a team, remember, with which you'll work for about a year; don't you think you're also supposed to let people take over once you're gone? You don't like that there is a big weekly meeting in which some people are bound to talk about projects you have no hand in? Don't you really have any ounce of scientific interest for what other members of your lab are doing, really?

See, I value your opinion. What I want here is for all of us to work in the best possible conditions. I want people to be motivated, I want people to have as much help as they need, I want people to be able to pop out of their office and find someone they can ask for a tip, I want people to have the opportunity to go out for lunch together. What I don't want is someone who, rich with his experience of one single lab with totally different dynamics, comes here and declares that it sucks. So may I kindly suggest, and please don't see any hard feelings in it, that you just go fuck yourself for a while and come back with constructive criticism once you've calmed down?