I know I complain about my job a lot here, but sometimes I really enjoy being as good at it as I am. That doesn’t exactly fix any of the issues that often come up or that I’ve complained about in other blog posts, but when problems aren’t defying all attempts to reason through them, I’m actually pretty good at figuring out what’s going on. Yesterday, for example, I was able to figure out the likely cause of some unexpected test data we were seeing and then prove out my hypothesis today. We spent all day yesterday trying to make some progress in a bit of procedural testing we were doing and kept running into steadily worsening results. I had some initial ideas about what might be causing it and those definitely contributed, but there was something going on beyond those variables that was giving us increasingly worse results. While my coworkers returned to their offices to pick at the data and try to see what that might show them, I moved to poke at my testing apparatus since my gut was telling me that there was a hidden variable at play that was the reason our results were so dramatically different. It took a bit of work (and a bit of time doing a safety review of the testing equipment to let my mind pick through things without me getting in my own way by actively directing it), but I eventually figured out that a part of the testing set up was warping a little bit with every test we performed. Giving it some time (about 22 hours) to rest and return to its original shape was enough to get us back to the results we expected to see, which proved out my theory that we needed to take a wider look at the system when performing tests.