I mentioned in last week’s “welcome” post about the stress I was dealing with as I was forced to confront the fact that the products I work on and test are zero steps removed from the potential to cause significant structural damage, debilitating injury, or even death if things go wrong enough or are used deliberately incorrectly. It was all for a presentation that didn’t REALLY go the way I’d hoped it would–either completely silent as everyone grappled with the fact that the Specter of Human Fragility loomed large over all the work I do or vocal recognition of the same–but I have also been thinking about it pretty much ever since. Not constantly, mind you. I’d be pulling my hair out if I was constantly thinking about it. I can put the thoughts away for a time now that the presentation is over and I don’t have my usual anxiety constantly bringing it to the front of my mind. Which has made me wonder why the presentation made me anxious enough to think about the potential for harm inherent in my work while the potential for harm inherent in my work doesn’t seem to register nearly as much. I’ve also been polling my coworkers about how they think about it, if they think about it all, and how they handle the thought all the while. Most of them seem to handle it much like I do (just not thinking about it/working to ignore it) and the few deviations aren’t particularly remarkable in their deviation. None of us are immune to the thought. None of us are uncaring. We all live with it in our minds as we each work through our parts in making sure something horrible never happens, but it doesn’t seem to weigh on any of us particularly heavily.
The thing that made all this stand out to me at first was the admission of one of my coworkers that part of the reason they’d left my team within a year of joining it was because they couldn’t handle the stress. It is, after all, easy for me to forget that not everyone is used to the level of stress I am and that thinking about one’s own mortality, the Specter of Human Fragility, or the harm one might feel responsible for doing to others is not a part of everyone’s day-to-day considerations. Most people, as I’m learning about society at large thanks to the way things are going in the US these days, have a difficult time understanding that they might be someone that stuff can happen to or that there will be non-immediate consequences to their actions. Most people probably don’t consider the potential–through failure to act, failure in general, or just bad luck–for people to die as a distant consequence of their actions or lack thereof. On the opposite side of the spectrum is someone like me. I’m pretty comfortable with the idea of death, what with my OCD (my Obsession is ways I can die/suicidal ideation, so I’m used to ignoring those thoughts when they’re not actually relevant to my current or near-future situation), decades of depression, and having confronted my own mortality via exposure to violence. I’m used to thoughts of my own death and the potential for death to happen to people who aren’t me in a way that most people aren’t.
That said, I’m not sure that all this really makes me more capable of handling the stress of having a job where a failure to act or a failure to act with sufficient thoroughness could potentially result in someone’s death in days, weeks, months, years, or even decades. I’m definitely better at coping with the existence of this stress, but I’m better at coping with the existence of any kind of stress. Last weeks’ mental exhaustion has me wondering if maybe I’m just really good at entirely circumventing it rather than facing it down. Or maybe I’m just really terrified of public speaking and fine with death (which is more likely than you might think, given how little I’ve had to publicly speak and how much I’ve considered my own death). It’s been over a week since the presentation finished (I’m writing this a little behind schedule) and I’m still thinking about how my work is often done to prevent people from dying and accidentally missing something huge could have devastating consequences for people I’ll never meet, but I’m not nearly as stressed out as I was. This last week of exposure to and acceptance of the idea has probably inoculated me against the stress as much as I can afford to be. After all, some amount of that stress is a good thing, since it will keep me focused and motivated to work. Which is probably how it works for all my coworkers. I have no idea if they’re as inured against this stress as I am, from a lifetime of exposure to death and one’s own potential to die, but they’ve all been working on this team as long as I have or longer, so they’re probably used to this background radiation of dangerous potential.
I don’t think any of this consideration is going to change the way I work. I’m already pretty risk-averse and considerate of the consequences of my actions. I’m already an incredibly thorough tester. I might seem blasé to some of my coworkers when it comes to doing dangerous tests or potentially damaging things around the lab, but I’ve long ago accepted that I’m better at predicting outcomes than they are and that I’m also more willing to accept damage as the price of finding out. I’m not afraid for things to go poorly since my whole job is figuring out how to make things go poorly and how to do it in a controlled way that won’t risk other people or myself. One of my coworkers put a pretty fine point on it when he said that I’m fine seeing failures happen in the lab but he wants to do the work he needs to do to prevent failures from happening at all. Which is kind of antithetical to our whole project process, actually, since we’re supposed to fuck around and find out quickly, so that we can make bigger changes each time rather than making tiny, creeping changes each update. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one who realizes this and trying to point it out to people has them just repeating the whole “but failures are bad!” line. Even my manager, who has pushed the “fail early and often” method of project development will make excuses when I try to push for early (albeit most-likely bad) results.
I don’t sweat it too much, though, except when it comes to them taking too much time to develop so that I’ve got less calendar time to test and have to work ridiculously long days and even weekends to make up for it. We’re all trying to make the best and safest product possible. Sure, some of our methods don’t overlap and might be at odds with each other, but most of our methods DO overlap and, well, the potential need for working very long days and over weekends is why I get paid hourly and can earn overtime. That’s the price of doing business, I guess. It doesn’t HAVE to be, but I’ve given up on trying to fix that particular problem. No one but we testers, all at the bottom of the power ladder, are motivated to change that, so it’s probably never going to happen. At least they all take us seriously when it comes to safety, though. No one has a better understanding of our products, their functions, and their potential pitfalls than we testers..