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.
Continue readingResearch and Development
Venting What Steam I Can From Work Frustrations
Today has been shitty and exhausting. Not the usual kind of shitty where it’s mostly my depression, my despair at the world in general, or me needlessly spiraling over some unlikely anxiety, nor is i shitty in the sudden-crisis-at-work kind of way. No, today, I got to spend four hours doing manual labor I can’t talk to anyone about to test a project I can’t talk about in any level of specificity while being watched by a bunch of people who frequently ignored my advice and all but shouted me down when I suggested that something they were worried about wasn’t actually a problem based on the hundreds of hours of experience I’ve gotten with the product at the heart of this project. I had to spend ten minutes enduring their nattering and catastrophizing about how what they observed could be the source of all these problems we’ve been trying to solve for months now before I could prove myself correct (that it was an optical illusion caused by their point of view and multi-directional movement of the thing I was moving around). I wasn’t going to let them interrupt my data collection to do the unnecessary thing they wanted to do, since that would require dismantling the current test, doing an entirely different test, setting my current test back up again, and then calibrating the measuring tools again. It took me all of a minute to prove they were wrong when I finally set their test up in a much faster and easier way than they thought it had to be done. As I moved to continue testing following their reluctant agreement that I was correct, one of them said “and now we’re never going to hear the end of it.” That really soured my mood, which is worth remarking since I wasn’t in a great mood already based on the whole “hours of manual labor while those coworkers stood around and wrote down numbers or pressed buttons” thing.
Continue readingThe Wearing Down Continues
Every so often, I just have one of those days where I forget to take time for lunch and wind up clocking out, turning to grab my bag, and noticing my lunch is still sitting on my desk where I left it when I got into work that morning. Today was one of those days. When I got in to work, I went to my desk, unpacked my bag, and then left to go check on the test I’d left running overnight. Three hours later, at twelve thirty, I returned to my desk for the first time. I left seconds later and didn’t come back for another hour. After typing up a quick message, I left again and didn’t go back for another two hours. When I stepped away to go get some files off my testing laptop, I got swept up in a “let’s go have a meeting at the local ice cream parlor” event and didn’t get back to my desk until almost five. So all I had to eat today, before I came home and ate dinner, was my fiber supplement, a Nutri-Grain bar, my daily coffee, and a scoop of rainbow sherbet at the ice cream parlor. All despite running around so much that I felt like a disgusting, sweaty mess before I’d even gone on my daily walk, much less worked several more hours and gone on a 4-mile round trip bike ride to a nearby ice cream parlor. And I was so tired by the first time I realized I’d never eaten lunch at 3pm that I just wasn’t hungry anymore.
Continue reading