On top of everything going on, all the woes of society and my on-going issues with finding a decent antidepressant that works for me, things at my job are picking back up again. Our project has been announced, we’ve gotten through all the manufacturing hurdles, and it is officially released to production as of a couple weeks ago. Which means that development can finally resume. That’s right. It’s released and actively being sold, but we’re back to working on it again. This isn’t terribly unusual for a lot of products (especially on stuff with lead-times as large as ours are–multiple months). A lot of things will be announced, get demonstrated or marketed, and have their designs shipped to factories to be produced long before development will stop working on them. Some of that work is, of course, designing future versions of the product, making improvements, and incorporating feedback based on customer experiences. A lot of it, though, is just the same work that’s been done the whole time but now focused solely on trying to remove as much material from the project as possible in order to bring down the cost of producing it. Sometimes that means chasing down ideas developers and engineers had but didn’t have a chance to try out during the initial development phase. Sometimes that’s just making choices to combat newly discovered problems that only came up after the product existed and was being used long enough. Regardless of the specifics, I’m now entering into what is going to be the longest period of heavy physical labor on this project, albeit at a much different pace than I was doing it earlier this year.

Now, I have to be ready to drop whatever else I’m doing at a moment’s notice and start testing. There’s enough stuff coming slowly and rather erratically down what passes for our pipeline that I can’t know for sure when any of it is going to reach a state where I can test it and it will all need feedback as quickly as possible. Which, for this project, means jumping into a bunch of physical labor as quickly as possible because there is a minimum amount of time required to do a decent amount of testing (which, in this case, is about half a week, if not longer). Most other stuff, when it shows up like this, can be tested pretty quickly. I can usually get an answer about a specific, targetted software fix within a few minutes. With most similar hardware fixes and changes it takes a bit longer, but the specific amount of time is always based on what, exactly, needs to be changed out. This project, though, needs me to be doing heavy enough labor that I need to stop to take rests and recognize when I’ve hit my limit for the day no matter how much I’ve actually tested. Everyone I work with understands the idea that the laws of physics prevent me from getting results as quickly as they’re used to for this kind of targeted or exploratory work, but that doesn’t mean I can take my time. I have to jump in immediately and get it going since I can always go back to other work during breaks or when I’m too tired to continue my more laborious work.

I don’t mind it much. It’s nice to get out of my office for work that requires physical effort and almost no mental effort. I don’t like needing to be the one pushing all this stuff down the pipeline since my coworkers are often pretty happy to just spin their wheels and wait for someone else to push things forward, but that means I can often schedule things really well for me if I’m doing a good job of staying on top of what my coworkers are working on. It’s a nice bit of control to have over my day-to-day that I’ve never gotten with any of the other projects I’ve ever worked on, but it is very much outside the scope of my job and something I absolutely don’t have the authority to do. And yet I still make it happen. Growing up in the midwest and being a student of subtext (due to my own initial lack of anything resembling comprehension) has left me in a very good position to accomplish my goals at a moderate but steady pace without needing to actually be an authority. If I was ever going to try to make demands or make the kind of scheduling I’m doing ironclad, then I’d immediately run into problems because I have either the least or the second least authority on the team (I have the least tenure in the second-lowest position but the guy in the lowest position has so much tenure he gets a lot of deference) and everyone knows it. But because we’re in the midwest and we all have these sort of subtextual gears built into our subconsciousnesses, people are used to responding favorably to other people who know how to fit into and drive those gears.

It feels pretty manipulative to work this way, but I’m pretty sure everyone appreciates that I know what’s going on, have all the answers to their questions about where every part of the project is, and that I seem to be able to anticipate their need for my time and attention so they don’t have to go through the trouble of seeking it out. After all, the overriding factor is that almost all of the engineers and developers I work with are more introverted than I am and having someone who can handle the social side of things for them, including graciously and gently initiating conversation that lasts exactly as long as they want it to before we get down to business, is worth a lot to them. I wouldn’t say I’m as good at reading my coworkers as my manager is, but I’m probably the second best in the group and I’m careful to never reveal it to them so we can all continue to exist in the polite fiction that I’m doing them all a favor. Which, if you look at it the right way, I actually am. Not having things pile up in test means everything gets done within a few days of it getting to me and they can get the feedback and data they want before they’re ready to start looking for the next set of data and information. It works great for all of us when it’s working and it works often enough that I’ve managed to avoid any major pile ups in my testing schedule. I’ve had a few fender-bender type moments, where a couple things ran into each other in the testing lab, but I was able to pull through them quickly enough since I took the time to slow down and figure out how to safely test them together without risking confusing results about what the impact of each change was.

It’s easy to forget how good I am at my job sometimes. Or maybe a lot of the time. I don’t feel very appreciated most days, given everything I do for my team in order to make my life and my work manageable, but I’m kind of used to that. I’ve spent most of my life doing thankless work of one kind or another and while I’m leery of getting myself into any kind of situation that resembles my childhood or the relationships I had with my immediate biological family, at least I get paid for doing this work. My boss doesn’t care that it’s technically not my job (though maybe that says more about how we clearly need someone to do the work I’m doing and don’t have someone to do it), he’s just happy I can get all of it and my assigned work done on the deadlines I’ve put forward. Which basically means I have access to as much overtime as I want to work. Sure, I want to work no overtime, but I am glad I can get my usual ten hours so I can make ends meet and continue paying down my student debt. It’s all give-and-take here. I just try to make sure the balance never tips too far in one direction.