An Englishman in DC - Blog from Dr.Thomas - Cairn founder and R&D director

Cairn's policy on going to big meetings is best described by one word – DON'T! But we do occasionally succumb to temptation, and the Society for Neuroscience meeting (this year held in Washington DC) gave us another salutary reminder of why this policy is such a good idea. The last time Cairn exhibited at this meeting was ten years ago. On that occasion our equipment successfully made it over to Los Angeles, which would have been fine apart from the minor detail that the meeting was actually in San Diego. Fortunately James managed to rectify the situation, but sadly the organisers couldn't be persuaded to move the meeting to LA at such short notice, so he had to spend hours on the phone arranging for our stuff to be forwarded. It did arrive in the nick of time though, which is more than can be said for this occasion.

This time we were sharing a stand (or “booth” in the transatlantic form of our strange language) with our friends at Redshirt Imaging. Martin wanted to show off his latest filter wheels, and Jez wanted to demonstrate the combined calcium and voltage-sensitive dye measurement system he'd been developing in collaboration with Marco Canepari, which uses those nice Redshirt cameras amongst other things. Unfortunately, some of those other things, if described too literally, can and did cause an outbreak of severe panic at US customs, resulting in the entire shipment being detained. The problem is, if you say “laser” to the average American, as it did on the shipping documents, then they think of offensive weaponry designed to shoot invaders right out of the sky, so Martin feels that they were entitled to be a little concerned. Next time – if there IS a next time!!! - he hopes that we would have the wit to describe that part of the system as a “microscopy light source” or something similar, as that baby couldn't even shoot down a fly.

Once all this was duly explained to US Customs, they did release the shipment, but our shippers then delivered it to a warehouse which immediately closed for the weekend. By the time it reopened, and most of our stuff could finally arrive, the meeting was nearly half way through. And we say “most of” because they'd managed to lose a small but important part, namely the light guide that connected the laser to the microscope. We had to wait another day for that. The shippers were well and truly living up to Martin's nickname for this particular outfit, as he has long contended that the “U” in their name stands for “Undelivered”. Or possibly “Unhelpful” too, as they were that as well on this occasion.

But as Martin said to Jez at the time, in a few billion years our Milky Way galaxy is going to be hit head-on by Andromeda, the repercussions of which ought to put these little problems into some sort of perspective. His philosophical attitude was assisted by the discovery – thanks to those nice people at Google who mark points of interest on their maps – of a most pleasant eating and drinking establishment, which specialised in a wide variety of European beers, including the wonderful and particularly appropriate Belgian offering of “Delirium tremens”. We also sampled as many others as were feasible on the three occasions that we felt the (urgent) need to visit this fine hostelry, which, for the record, is the Quarry House at Silver Spring. So, at least in retrospect, this particular Cairn outing wasn't all bad really.