Four Core Rules for Functioning Within the SWAT Laboratory
1. No one actually cares what you’re thinking or doing at all of the countless moments of your day. But, if you feel compelled to share, you should sign up for a Twitter account and *silently* broadcast the rambling monologue that is your life into the uncaring ether. You should *not* broadcast the corresponding unfortunate sequence of noises into the shared resource that is the audible spectrum within the laboratory.
2. Off-topic conversation should be kept to a minimum within the laboratory. For this purpose, pretty much everything is defined as off-topic: Non-work discourse should obviously be severely restricted, and longer work relevant discussions should largely be moved into a conference room. In any event, when impractical to follow these guidelines, the volume and content should generally be carefully monitored (see Rule 3).
3. This is not kindergarten nor even middle or high school. Please remember to restrict what limited amount of personal conversation that does manage to slip out (see Rules 1 and 2) to topics appropriate for work. Even better would be to ensure their appropriateness for thinking adults.
4. There are no stupid questions, but there are questions which it would be stupid to ask of your coworkers rather than the limitless engines of content retrieval available today, here, now, right at your fingertips. Before callously disrupting the onward progress of science as enabled by your fellow laboratory denizens, please reflect for a moment or two on whether or not this question would be as easily or better answered via your own efforts, whether by your internal powers of deduction and mastery of logic or through the assistance of that pesky, ubiquitous rascal: The Internet.
