I’ve spent the last few days donating small bits of my fingers to the project I’m doing at work thanks to a mix of unlucky incidents and things slipping as I’ve been applying force. It’s made for an increasingly rough time given how many of my fingers I’ve had to bandage, how often I have to wash my hands, and how I keep needing to reapply those bandages in order to keep my (this makes most of them sound worse than they are) open wounds from getting dirt in them. When it was one finger, it was easy to make sure that one wasn’t involved in everything going on so I wouldn’t injure it again. Now that it’s half my fingers (and mostly knuckles at that), I don’t really have a choice other than to continue risking my digits. Which also makes it sound worse than it is. Most of the danger is just, say, a wrench on a bolt slipping or the nut suddenly coming loose, which causes my hand to lurch into a hard metal surface that refuses to let my hands go without taking a souvenir. Some of it is decidedly worse than that and not something I’m going to share on a public blog post due to the nature of my work and the incidents. All of which means that now I have a very deep appreciate for bandages and how “waterproof” doesn’t also mean “soap-proof.”

This is all in the course of testing the same project I’ve been working on for maybe three years now (or maybe two and a half?) that was supposed to be done and on to version two exactly a year ago, but which is very much not done and not on to version two. Turns out that changing stuff that never then makes it to test due to turn around time on parts and the need to deliver “beta” units to customers can have some unexpected results. Turns out that maybe, when the tester with over a decade of exerperience and the most functional knowledge of the product says “I really need this equipment to test this fully,” the answer to their incredibly reasonable demand should not be some form of “we can look at that after we get this initial release done and address any problems that come up in version two.” I hate very little more than having a test case that would have caught a problem reported from the field that I was not able to run due to impending deadlines or a “need” to deliver results quickly. Thankfully it’s mostly small things that are just annoyances that only take up time because they’re weird and difficult to reproduce but every so often, like happened with this project, it’s something that winds up being a bit more serious (all the safety precautions worked and prevented anything bad from happening in every single test I’ve run since this was reported from the field, despite my best attempts to get around them without removing them entirely, so thankfully it’s a relatively non-risky problem: it just still looks pretty bad).

This project has really been a “blood, sweat, and tears” thing. I knew that the phrase was absolutely a literal thing that has long applied to many professions, but I really didn’t think that it would be something I encountered so… defeatedly. Aside from this blog post and some complaints to my friends, even the incident didn’t really do much other than make me stop working long enough to bandage my wounds, file an incident report, and then get back to what I was doing so I could clean up the mess and finish the test. I mean, it’s only significant because of how bad it could have been. My own preparations and the rigorous safety measures I keep in place while I work all did their parts to keep anything really bad from happening, but it’s difficult to ignore all thoughts of what might have been if I’d been less prepared, reacted more slowly, or some other factor had twisted events just enough to provide any other outcome. While I do appreciate direct evidence that all of my risk-aversion strategies and modes of thinking are absolutely worth continuing, it still kind of sucks to have had it all confirmed and to still, you know, need to work like normal.

That’s probably part of why I’ve injured myself so many additional times since that moment. The addrenaline spike and crash yesterday have left me more physically drained and worn down that I’ve felt in a long time, which is not helped by having to constantly fuss over bandages that need to be reapplied after every trip to the bathroom (I’m also running out, so they’ve getting added to my list for tomorrow’s grocery shopping). The more tired you are, the more likely you are to make mistakes that will hurt you. Too bad the only thing that would have prevented this from happening to me was someone else doing it and that the only thing that would have allowed that to happen would have been me burning more PTO and ruining this week’s shot at some overtime. The choices we make to continue living in the world… Until I find another job that will pay me as well as this one does, I don’t have much of a choice but to keep picking work over just about everything else…