I have spent the last week working on a now months-long issue at work. I mean, I’ve been working on it for months, but over the last couple weeks it has become a particular focus for me as the mechanical engineers and I are taking some of my recent test results and reproducing them again and again, tweaking variables here or there, as we try to find a path out of this mess. Since I work on heavy machinery and the software that goes in that machinery, this means that I have spent my time working on gearboxes and the goop that goes inside them. Which means that I finally have a job that involves getting my hands dirty despite largely being a white collar worker (well, this job is a sort of interesting mix of white and blue collars but it’s still mostly white collar since it is still a knowledge job by-and-large) and that I’m also using all the engineering, math, and physics knowledge I’ve picked up over the years of being raised by two engineers and mistakenly believing that I was going to study math and physics in college because I was really good at calculus. It also means that my poor, sensitive nose has been assaulted by some of the most heinous scents I’ve had the displeasure to sniff. The only things that outdo them is raw sewage and the sulfurous chemical solution my chemistry teacher in high school made everyone sniff on the first day of class so he could threaten to put it under our noses if we ever fell asleep on him (which smelled so much like raw sewage that it is pointless to make the distinction between the malodorus mixtures). Even through a properly-fitted N95 mask, some of these stinks send me reeling, lightheaded and nostrils aflame, any time I’m unfortunate enough to stand over one of these suckers when we crack them open to check our test results.

It is so bad that I am genuinely surprised that we haven’t had people from other departments and areas of the building come over to find out what horrible thing we’re doing and demand that we stop polluting the building. I mean, one of them was so bad and diffuse that it filled the whole lab and stuck around for hours, even with the air filtration system running enough to get the humidity down to the a single-digit percentile! We had people come around the first time this happened, concerned that the sulfurous scent in the area was a gas leak, but that didn’t happen this time. Maybe because my boss told people what to expect ahead of time or maybe because people remembered a year ago and when they realized it was coming from us, stopped getting closer to the nasty smell that wasn’t a problem that needs fixing. For them, anyway. We still need to fix the problem. And whatever other problems there are. Currently–presented in a way that avoids specifics–there is far more friction in the system that is this machine than there should be, which is bad because it’s taking way more energy to power it than it should. It’s also wearing the machines out faster than they ought to be, faster even than my initial heavy testing showed, and we’re not sure why the heavily tested unit was less worn down than these more recent test units. We cannot, for the life of us, despite the expertise of my coworkers and my own research into physics and engineering, figure why this is happening since everything is set up the way it is supposed to be according the consultants we hired to design this component. Who haven’t been super helpful yet, I might add…

It is an on-going mystery, the second such for this project, and all we can do is follow the guess-and-check method. We’ve broken a lot of test equipment, poured out a lot of goop, tried many different configurations, altered our test procedure multiple ways using the same combinations of equipment, and only made incremental gains. Which aren’t nothing, mind you. Those start to add up eventually and enough of them should get us under the “good enough” threshold, but it would really be nice if we could figure out what’s going on and why. There should be a logical explanation for all of this, considering it is a relatively simple machine, but there’s a long distance between theoretical applications and their mechanical operation. I mean, physics problems addressing practical engineering ideas often say things like “ignoring friction” and any engineer who ignored friction would be quickly out of a job. I mean, friction is literally the problem we’re trying to solve and while there’s a lot of theoretical explanations for why there’s all that friction there, the practical answer has thus-far elluded us. All our gains have been further optimization of the existing system rather than any thing drastically wrong being fixed and it looks like the next few things we’re trying are going to be the same.

As much as I’d like to believe we’re through the worst of the stink since we’ve found the best goop to use, I’m not sure that’s true. We may yet need to try old goops again when we figure out new variables to tweak, to make sure the improvements we’re seeing aren’t just a result of a particular combination of items, a fluke, or some other outside variable we didn’t anticipate. Reproduceability is key in testing and sometimes that means just clicking a button over and over again and sometimes that means spending the morning reassembling a testing apparatus with new stuff, running a few tests, and then spending the afternoon disassembling that testing apparatus so we can check our results and try to figure out what to change next. It’s slow, incredibly smelly going and I am so tired of being nasally assaulted every afternoon and onward through the rest of each day. It’s exhausting! It really makes an already onerous task extremely miserable since it’s not like I can NOT work around the smelly stuff. And it’s not like noseplugs would help because then I’d just be tasting it instead and I’d rather smell it than taste it… Ugh, I’m ready for this to be done so I can go back to my normal heavy manual labor. At least the only strong smell involved in that is the smell of my own drying sweat after a particularly busy afternoon.