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In the dark part of the year, I use a "light alarm clock" to trigger me to wake at the right time, because I'm very fixated on light cycles. In high summer, I don't bother with any sort of alarm clock, even on days when I'm working in Berkeley and need to be up by 6am. So a significant part of the turning of the seasons for me is paying attention to when I need to set the light-alarm for commute days, and when I need to set it for WFH days, and when I can stop setting it for those things.

It's turning toward autumn, so I definitely need to set it for commute days, but something clicked over in me and I'm just leaving it set all the time and once again working on getting in an hour or so of personal work before I "go to the office" (i.e., sit down at the work computer in my home office).

I don't tend to have creative brain function in the evenings these days, which I ascribe partly to how draining my day-job is, and partly to the impossibility of having perfect vision correction for extended screen time. (I have 3 sets of lenses that I use in various contexts and which I use depends on what set-up I'm using and how my eyes are feeling on any given day). But getting in morning work depends on actually getting out of bed at a reasonable time instead of lazing in bed listening to audiobooks and playing on my phone. Or going back to sleep for another half hour or so. I joke that the biggest benefit of WFH is that I finally get Enough Sleep all the time.

But since it's autumn, and I need the light-alarm for commute days, it's only a minor adjust met to leave the alarm set all the time, which stimulates me to get out of bed with time to spare. I actually have two alarms programmed. One at 5:30am and one at 6:30am. For commutes, I need the 5:30 one (which gets me out of bed no later than 6 and on the road by 6:30). For ordinary dark-season days, I tend to use the 6:30am alarm, which gets me out of bed by 7, so I'm good to go by 7:30 and don't have to sit at the work computer until 8. If I leave both alarms set for an ordinary day, then--as long as I don't just go back to sleep with the light on--I can be up, dressed, and ready by 6:30am which hypothetically gives me half an hour for breakfast and whatnoe and an hour for personal projects that require a fresh brain.

I haven't done that for quite some time, but I did it today. Maybe I'll keep it up?

So, as is fairly predictable, scheduling a week-and-a-half vacation for Worldcon means that day-job is full of stress and overwork. But it got me thinking about my career path in interesting ways. And having chatted about that with a co-worker in the zoom-time before a meeting started, I thought I'd share some of those thoughts here as well.

Firstly, if you aren't aware of what I do for a living, my job is best described as "industrial failure analysis for pharmaceutical manufacturing." I deliberately don't mention my employer's name in social media because I do not speak for my employer in any way or form. But let's just say you'd recognize the name.

"Failure analysis" means that any possible thing that goes wrong in the manufacture of a complicated biological drug falls within my scope (and that of my department --it's not just me!). Most of it is rather tedious everyday failures or unavoidable issues. But every once in a while it becomes ... exciting. "Exciting" in the bad sense. We classify failure investigations as Minor, Major, or Critical.

Minor means "doesn't in any way impact the quality of our product, but something happened differently than it was supposed to happen and we need to document why everything's ok." "Major" means "we aren't immediately sure whether this impacts the quality of our product -- maybe no, maybe yes -- but it's all under control and the worst case is we need to reject some in-process material.

And then we come to "critical". Critical means that we shipped product out the door that may not meet our expectations, either of quality or of compliant manufacture. Critical is bad. The worst situation for critical is on the recall level, though most critical investigations don't reach that level.

Investigations don't get assigned entirely randomly, so critical investigations go to people we think are up to the challenge, though in order to get to that level you need to do some critical investigations before you're operating at the highest levels. There's a lot of structural support for critical investigations, and when an investigator first starts doing them, it's mostly at a secretarial level. Other people make the decisions and guide the activities and you write the report.

I remember my first few critical investigations. I was terrified. But I became less terrified when I realized that I wasn't expected to know how to run the investigation, I was just expected to turn the results into a coherent report. (Which is a skill in itself.)

And gradually, as I gained experience (over the last nearly-20 years), the critical investigations I was assigned were more and more within my control. As in: I was the one who had to know who the experts were to call in, and how to structure the investigation, and how to keep management updated on the progress, and when to challenge the direction and insist on particular investigation activities.

Because the increasing responsibility balanced out the increasing confidence and familiarity, the terror level never actually decreased. OK, maybe not "terror". I'm no longer afraid that I'll be asked to do something I'm not up to doing. But it is incredibly stressful to manage something this complex (along with all the other work I still have to complete).

On the one hand, I periodically look at my career path and think, "Isn't it incredibly wonderful that I stumbled into a job that I have become this good at?" And on the other hand, I'm increasingly looking forward to retirement and not dealing with the possibility of this level of stress entering my life without warning and without consideration for anything else I have going on.

So here I am, wishing that I could focus on getting some of my older investigations tidied up and closed before my time off, or could handle some of the unexpected bolus of minor investigations that the random currents of fate have dumped on us in the last couple weeks, or get to work on one of the improvement projects that I've had on the back burner literally for years, or even just go into a vacation rested and relaxed. And instead I'm working on a critical investigation, and trying to finish up four other major investigations that have a *hope* of closing in the next week (as opposed to having them still on my plate when I get back), oh and we're having a (routine, no big deal) FDA inspection this week so everyone is doing double-duty providing things for that on top of supporting my project.

But on the up side, the special investigational test results that started trickling in during my 2-hour zoom meeting this afternoon are looking good. And the investigation may solve some interesting questions as well as demonstrating that It's All Good After All. And I'll probably get another corporate attaboy award for this (which, honestly, doesn't make that much difference for me except to cement my confidence that I never have to worry about job security).

So, you know, all in all, life is good. I love my job. (No sarcasm.) I feel like I make a real difference in my small corner of the world. And I continually marvel at my luck at falling into a job that my brain is perfectly suited for, and that my bosses and employers recognize how valuable I am at what I do. But I wish I could sleep for a week.

Work had a "team-building" thing yesterday afternoon to celebrate various milestones (like closing out all our 100+ day old investigations) with both the investigators and our QA partners. Of course, having been scheduled well in advance, it ended up happening during a week when we have multiple high-profile investigations at critical stages and have been facing a multi-week workload crunch. But that's life. A couple of people had to drop out to get work done, but most of us showed up.

Previous teambuilding events have been things like corporate-structured productivity exercises (gag me), escape rooms (surprisingly fun -- would have been more fun without the time limit), and some sort of cooking thing (didn't attend because it conflicted with FOGCon last year). This time,, given the constraints, we did an online murder mystery thing. It was...ok.

The mystery puzzle itself was fairly straightforward and stereotyped. Several of us predicted in chat who the most likely murderer would be even before they'd gotten to the death. The information came in an initial live sketch (set up to be  properly distanced zoom presentation, so props for using the technology); a set of relatively simple logic puzzles to "unlock" things like relevant newspaper articles, forensics reports, and toxicology information; and the opportunity to interview the various (remaining) participants in our team breakout rooms.

The live sketch was overdone and crowded out time for the actual investigation activities (we ended up having to do the puzzle-unlocking and report-reading in parallel with doing the interviews, which meant we didn't have the background to know what questions to ask). I wasn't the only person who found the live sketch to be a bit of sensory overload to an unpleasant degree.

I got picked to be my team's captain/spokesperson (which I was completely unsurprised at -- and if you know my history of such things, you won't be surprised either). But I confess that my usual high-level competitive spirit had already checked out at that point. Fortunately, the team members were multitasking independently, so one person took charge of the interviews, a couple of us worked on the logic puzzles, and when we compared notes to ID the suspect, means, and motive, it was straightforward enough that we didn't have to hash through things.

We tied for most right answers, though I tried to argue that we should have had a perfect score because one of the "official" answers didn't jibe with the toxicology evidence.

The event organizers (who do these things as a business) knew we were a group from [name of pharmaceutical company] but were not aware that our group were professional investigators. They had a bit of a "Doh!" moment about some of our approaches and commentary when that got mentioned in the post-discussion.

All in all, ok as an afternoon's silliness. Not so much with the "team building" but definitely a bit of "team affirming". Definitely affirms the value of having a bunch of independent multi-taskers who don't wait to have an authority organize their activities.

 Closed two investigations today at work, turned in an extension request for another one, and hope to have a fourth submitted for review by Friday. On top of that, I turned a request to shepherd a memo through our (recently upgraded) electronic document system into a "walk and talk" demonstration for the rest of the department, since I seem to have become the early adopter of the upgraded system in our group. That's all it takes to turn me from yesterday's sluggish "I'll never get caught up" to a feeling of accomplishment. Of course, all it takes to destroy that feeling is to get handed a couple more assignments before I have a chance to clean up my last oldie-moldy.

The Tuesday Movie Group watched Shakespeare in Love and I was reminded once again what a jewel of perfect what-it-meant-to-be-ness that movie is. I think it is to historic movies what Galaxy Quest is to sci-fi.

Biked down to pick up my car from the shop on my lunch break. Just a routine major service, with a couple add-ons for things that simply start needing replacement after (checks calendar) twelve years.

Yesterday the mail brought me a packet of dried sourdough starter from joycebre and I started the revivification process this evening. Too soon to see much progress yet. I have christened my culture "Sara" in honor of aryanhwy 's birthday request. May they both continue to be bubbly and effervescent.

 I should have had three Major investigations close this week, but only one did so because the other side of the process is just as overburdened as the investigators are. Still, I'm in spitting distance of being down to only four Major investigations (the difference between Major and Minor is how hard you have to work to justify not rejecting product), three of which are over 100 days old (because they haven't held up the release of any important batches, so they slip down the priority list). This means that it's about time for my boss to assign me a couple of brand new "this trumps everything!" investigations that will ensure I never get caught up. Oh, and the oldest of my investigations is the one I inherited from someone who left the company. I was told "It's essentially done; we're just waiting for the results of this one study..." Except that "essentially done" means "nothing was ever written down, but you might be able to reconstruct it from the documents in her folder." One of those documents, among the references cited, lists "the memo so-and-so will provide." Today's gloomy task was to email so-and-so and ask if they have any clue whether the cited memo ever existed.

But hey, we're starting a new round of "we're going to come up with projects to improve productivity and reduce closure time" and no one understands why we aren't excited about spending a lot of non-existent time on them, given that every previous round ended up with the "improvement projects" being cancelled or undermined. It's so great to have a naively optimistic manager who is absolutely positively certain that this time Lucy won't pull the football away.

[I don't usually repost entire entries from my Alpennia blog, but I thought this one might be of enough general interest to duplicate here.]

Today, my department at work is taking me out for a lunch celebrating my 15 year anniversary at the company. My plan and goal (knock on wood) is to be here to celebrate my 20 year anniversary and ideally to retire at some point shortly thereafter. I don’t know whether my career path is at all typical of my generation, but it’s certainly different from that of my parents’ generation and feels different from how my younger friends talk about career expectations. So I thought it might be amusing to set out exactly what my work history has been (with all the serial numbers carefully filed off).

When I graduated college with a BS in a life science, my initial thought was to find a job in the same town where the university was located. Something doing research, perhaps. The why is lost to time, but probably it was just a matter of not having a clear idea what to do next and that was one way to narrow the possibilities down to a manageable level. But I was a practical sort, so the first goal was to get a job, any job, to enable me to continue my career search. That’s how I ended up working in fast food. For a month. Not that the job drove me away, but by the end of that month, one of my housemates had recommended me for a position at his workplace, which had the advantage of being 40 hours a week and better pay. And that’s how I ended up working in mobile home construction. I believe that was for six months. I was continuing my more science-oriented job search through it all, but people with life science skills looking for entry level positions are a glut on the market in a university town. So when an opportunity offered itself for a “wanderjahr” in the UK, I decided it was a good opportunity—one I might never have again.

That opportunity involved room and board in exchange for…well, what it was supposed to be in exchange for was not quite what the expectations turned out to be. (Nothing horrible, but lots of emotional labor in addition to the economic productivity.) I’d originally gone thinking I might be there for a year. I stuck it out for two months, after which I still had enough money to do a further month of sightseeing before heading back home. (The job there did not include pay, so this was money saved up from the construction job.)

Heading literally “home” since I defaulted back to my parents’ house at that point. The life sciences job search began anew, but once I’d gotten a sense of the job market, I decided that the best pickings were going to be in the SF Bay Area. Fortunately I had relatives I could stay with there. I think it was about half a year’s searching to find a job. I’ve never been substantially jobless since then. That job was with a small private clinical lab (doing medical testing for doctors unaffiliated with hospitals). Mostly I did “chief cook and bottle washer” work, washing glassware, preparing media in petri dishes, running the blood chemistry analyzer. I also learned phlebotomy (taking blood samples) and did some of the morning rounds of the care homes that we serviced. I have stories. After a couple years there, I realized that the only step up in that organization was to get certified as a medical technician and perform the more complicated analytic work. And that wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So back to job hunting, though not with any urgency.

The first interview I went to, I was offered the position at the end of the interview. I rushed back to give my boss notice (he was about to go on vacation), found a new place to live, and moved, all in the space of two weeks. That job was at a university-affiliated lab where I mostly worked with lab animals. The job lasted a couple years until the lab was defunded, but a former boss had a lead on a position with her new employer (a start-up biotech company) and I barely had to interview before I was hired. This is something of a continuing motif. I seem to be good at making an impression on the people who hire me.

The biotech company gave me opportunities to learn a lot of new lab skills and my second boss there was delighted to have me tackle database projects, SOP writing, and assorted other skill-accumulation opportunities. I enjoyed the work, impressed the management, and even got a company award. I might have been happy to stay there for quite a while, but two things intervened. One was that I’d been thinking more and more about tackling the intellectual challenge of graduate school—not in the life sciences (which is where I would have been steered if I’d done it right out of college), but in linguistics, as an outgrowth of my historic interests. So I’d investigated the possibilities at a local university and was taking some classes through extension to beef up my application. The second thing? I’d been at the biotech company for 7 years when my employer hit a snag in getting their product approved, resulting a quarter of the company getting laid off. I was laid off and laughed all the way through my exit interview because I was getting 6 months’ severance instead of worrying about when to give notice. I had some mild anxiety during the few months between being laid off and getting my grad school acceptance, but in the mean time, personal connections had landed me a job at a small fiction magazine that would be the perfect half-time job to go along with my academics.

The magazine job filled the next three years until I felt my professional development called for switching to student instructor jobs. Those carried me through the remaining (painful, many) years of grad school until I’d maxed out my eligibility for teaching positions, which meant it was time to hand in my dissertation and return to the Real World. I’d entered grad school thinking in terms of an academic career, but during the (*cough* eleven *cough*) years I was in school, the academic job market had shifted from promising to abysmal and I recalibrated my expectations. I was in my 40s, I was part owner of a house, I owned a lot of stuff™ that I didn’t want to be moving every year until I’d racked up enough short-term positions to maybe earn a tenure-track job somewhere. I said goodbye to the dream of academia and for the first time in 20 years found myself seriously worrying about being unemployed.

On the other hand, I had a lot of possible directions to go. I had experience in biotech, in teaching, in publishing, in writing…and after only a couple months of searching, I landed the perfect intersection of those skills: technical writing and editing for the documentation department of a pharmaceutical company. It was a temp job for a crunch project and the contract was up after I’d been there for five months. I liked the location. I liked the work environment. So I asked my agency rep to see if he could find me something else. Evidently my manager told people I walked on water, because I got a call from another manager saying, “I don’t really have time to do interviews, so can you just start next month?” I didn’t worry about asking what the job entailed; I said yes. And that’s how I landed a job that was even more perfect for my skillset and one I never even knew existed. (Discrepancy investigation.) The job turned permanent after four months and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since (with several promotions). There have been a couple times when I've looked into lateral moves in the company, but when it comes down to it, I love what I'm doing and I'm damned good at it.

It’s not as continuous a career path as a previous generation would have expected. It wasn’t until my present job that I had anything resembling a decent retirement plan. And 15 years is more than twice as long as I've been at any other single job. But it’s a more solid path than many of my contemporaries have enjoyed. And having a retirement plan at all is more than most people expect these days. (Retirement planning is on my mind a lot these days.) Those are just the salaried jobs. There’s also been the writing: not high paying, but fairly regular and varied. The thread through it all is broad-based technical knowledge and language skills. Sometimes the emphasis has been on one, sometimes on the other. Being able to combine them ended up being the secret to my success.

It occurs to me, in this month of graduations and students wondering what they'll do with their lives: none of the major turns of my career path are anything I would have (or even could have) predicted that day I stood at the end of a very long line of black-robed graduates to receive my diploma. (They graduated my whole division in a lump, grouped alphabetically by major. My major was Zoology.) You don't need to know what all the branches of your path will be. The important thing is to start walking and be ready for whatever comes your way.

When I get one of Those Calls at work--the ones that say, "So…something came up and $HigherUp would like you to drop everything else and work on it"--it's amusing to figure out what they think they're getting by tapping me.

To be honest, sometimes the answer is along the lines of, "The original investigator is on vacation/out sick/unavailable and we need someone who can come up to speed five minutes ago and be comfortable finishing some fiddly bits and signing their name to someone else's investigation report." There's a time crunch (because if there weren't they'd just wait for the original investigator to return), but very little stress.

Sometimes the answer is, "This investigation is going to be Important and we don't want to risk assigning someone who hasn't ever done that level of investigation before." That's bunk, because if people are never assigned projects above the level of what they've done before, they'll never gain that experience. I'm always delighted when projects of this sort get assigned to someone else because I enjoy seeing other people develop the skill sets to do them. Not that I don't enjoy the big complex ones myself, but…share the love, you know?

Sometimes the answer is, "This involves a topic that you were involved in the last time it came up, so we wanted to save some time and not reinvent the wheel." With these, I always like to point out the value of retaining long-term employees who know what was going on in the company a decade ago, and who was working on things, and what the issues were. $Employer isn't always that good at retaining talent. I'm unusually non-ambitious (in part due to where I am in my career life-path) and they shouldn't count on that.

But the ones I like (such as this week's project that inspired this topic) are the investigations where they picked me because of my writing skills. Because I can take someone else's detail-overloaded, highly-technical, bogged-down-in-minutiae explanation, convert it into a summary that a future auditor can understand easily, and word it in a way that neither minimizes the issues nor inflames concern. Here's how it goes:

1. Reads up on incident description, procedures, and initial search of past similar issues.
2. Listens to two-hour explanation from subject matter experts.
3. More focused read of relevant documents.
4. Composes three paragraphs explaining problem, its context, and underlying causes.
5. Subject matter experts: "Uh, yeah, wow. So glad they put you on the job."

Folks: if you ever wondered whether superb writing skills can make you a decent living, I offer my career in evidence. Mind you, I wouldn't have the job in the first place without having the science background, and the writing wouldn't matter if I couldn't do the analytic parts, but what gets me those phone calls (and the implicit approval of $ImportantPeople) is the writing skills. It's worth it to work on them.

So you know how I had that dream that handed me my war cry of "Because I'm bossy and have control issues!? I think I had another one of those moments today in an off-site team building day with co-workers. We're doing this competitive small-team competition involving building a tower out of uncooked spaghetti with a marshmallow on top. (Look: either you've done one of these and you know exactly what I'm talking about or this makes as much sense as one of my dream journal entries.) And as the boss is explaining the scenario and even before we draw lots for teams I say, "Ok, I have the perfect design in mind, so whoever ends up on my team, be prepared to follow orders and hit the ground running." Which was totally against the intended theme that productive teams are all about give and take and open communication and cooperative interactions.

Things might have gone differently if this was a thrown-together group that was truly exploring new teamwork possibilities with unknown strangers. But no, my team members just shrugged and said, "What do you want us to do?"

We won (naturally). Me? Competitive much? What gave it away? And for anyone who isn't already aware: if you ever end up on a team with me, just know that I can lead, I can follow, but I will not tolerate futzing around negotiating and "processing" -- especially when there's bragging rights to be won.

Clearly I need to get back to the "write every day" program. The combination of several nights of mild insomnia (of the wake-up-at 5am variety) and an attack-scene for the novel forced me to deviate from The Plan (of only writing chronologically) because the attack-scene was cresting at that "write me now or lose me forever" point. If I've got spare imagination that's up to working out scenes, I need to give them something programmed to chew on. The scene is useful, but I want to avoid falling into the old habit of writing all the "good parts" first. So I typed in that scene tonight and finally typed up some notes on chronology/relative ages of the various main characters (including tying them in very approximately to key events in our timeline, although even the real-world history bits that affect my plot are all well off stage).

Work is creeping into my weekend, but in a good way: baby shower for a co-worker tomorrow afternoon (she gets a promissory for a hand-knit something-or-other for the baby), then a random party thrown by someone I've gotten to know in the course of several of the Life-Eating Investigations. I'm thinking of that one as more of a career investment than a "have a good time" event since I'll get to schmooze with Key People.

Sunday, I am keeping unscheduled.

1. Dad arrived for a week's visit (a wedding and a memorial) and told me all sorts of horror stories about his flights. On the other hand, if you're going to absent-mindedly pack a kitchen knife in your carry-on, you can't expect the trip to go completely smoothly.

2. Over lunch today I started matching names with characters on my Dramatis Personae list. I'm starting with the major characters and will fill in the minors as I do the revision I think. But I'm not quite ready for that as I need to work on surnames and place names as well. Also forms of address. Using the usual English words just doesn't feel right, so I think I once again need to pick some Latin roots and ring my changes on them and see how it looks.

3. Wrote another fill-in scene in Part I. It occurred to me that if one of the justifications for saddling the unexpected heiress with a professional bodyguard is the potential for abduction and forced marriage to gain control of her fortune, then it would probably be a good idea to actually have a foiled abduction somewhere in there, otherwise everyone looks unnecessarily paranoid. Besides, it means protagonist #2 gets to kill someone on-screen, and it may actually be her only chance to do so in the entire story. I'm sure it would be very frustrating to be a highly trained bodyguard and professional duelist and then not get to kill anyone on-screen in the entire book.

4. It's a good thing I like to do lectures fairly free-form and off-the-cuff, because when I got pulled in to do a training session on one day's notice, only got my hands on the powerpoint file hour before the training, half an hour later discovered that I would have no power except emergency lighting in the conference room (and therefore would need to print out the slides as handouts), and then got bumped from the room by a bunch of engineers halfway through the hour and needed to move the entire class to the break room instead ... well, let's just say that a rigid presentation format wouldn't have worked very well. Got some very useful questions as well.

5. Some friends sent me the following: my very own plush headless dancing chicken. (It has a purple tutu -- that's how you know it dances.) It was made by Stuffe & Nonsense. I don't think I'll take it in to work, but a better version of the picture may well become an icon.