The usual pre-vacation emergencies
Aug. 18th, 2022 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjSo, 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.
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.
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