hrj

State of the Heather

2025-03-20T04:51:50Z

I keep pledging to post here more often, focusing on things that don't fit as well into my author blog. It just feels so hard to make time, but mostly it's my perennial problem of having trouble focusing on more than one social media venue at a time.

Retirement planning continues. I've gone back to taking Fridays off and using them for pre-retirement tasks, since I have some Personal Days that I won't get reimbursed for if I don't use them up. Last Friday I powered through most of the checklist items for things my employer has outsourced to Fidelity. There's an in-person appointment this Friday to hammer out the details for my 401K.

There has been slight movement on the Social Security front: Medicare asked me to get a form filled out by my employer saying I've had healthcare coverage for the last two years. So I guess that means that my application has actually been reviewed to some extent. Still no word on the Social Security itself. I think next week's task will be to see if I can get an in-person appointment to see if there's anything holding it up and maybe get an estimate (given that I was supposed to have started getting payments this month...).

Work is pretty much going to keep me running full speed until the last day, but I'm officially off the list for being assigned "major" investigations, since I can't guarantee that I'd get them finished before I leave.

Maybe next post I'll start getting caught up again on Things I Have Read.

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Me and Waking and Calendars and Such

2023-09-08T03:40:26Z

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?

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Is it or isn't it?

2023-01-26T21:21:02Z

My rule of thumb for my temperature-on-rising tracking is that "normal" is anything under 98.0F (unless I've lolled in bed until 9am or so, which it's higher). This morning I was 98.1 and later in the morning the back of my throat is tickling. I did a Covid test, which was negative, but as a precaution I've told the boss I'm not working on-site tomorrow (which I'd been scheduled to do), and I dropoped messages to the dentist's office (where I was yesterday afternoon) and the masseuse (where I was Tuesday evening). (Both were appreciative of the note.)

I have previously noted that WFH makes questions around sick leave a bit different. Whereas the previous balance involved "am I sick enough to not work at all," now there are two levels: "Am I sick enough to not go on site" and "am I sick enough to justify not working at all." WFH means there's that option of "there's stuff I really need to get done, but I don't want to expose people" (which we all used to make Bad Decisions around). But it feels (to me) like the bar for "not work at all" is higher.l

In any case, maybe the warmer weather had provoked some flowers and it's allergies, but I'm glad to be able to make better choices that I felt like I had in the Before Times.

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The usual pre-vacation emergencies

2022-08-19T01:25:38Z

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.

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Why I have the reputation I do at work

2022-06-08T18:41:18Z

So, we were doing a role-playing exercise in a training session for "facilitating discussions" and my small group was assigned the discussion topic "your local $SportsTeam has donated $10million to the city to improve the quality of life -- what should you spend it on?"

I'm supposed to be role-playing the "contrary" person, so first off I wanted to know what strings were attached. What sorts of concessions did $SportsTeam want in exchange for this bribe...uh...donation? Or what were they trying to make up for?

The mock facilitator handled that digression nicely.

Another team member proposed that a good use of the money would be to install and maintain more public toilet facilities, on the basis that this would be a general civic good. Another team member raised the discussion of whether public toilets would become an "attractive nuissance" for unhoused people, and was concerned about placement and whether they would improve the quality of life or detract. (I could be kind and assume that this team member was role-playing and did not simply have a knee-jerk NIMBY attitude.)

I had to announce that I was incapable of role playing on this topic, because in my opinion if we could do anything to improve the lives of unhoused people it *would* improve the overall quality of life even if no one else was directly benefitted. And I went on a little rant about how the housing crisis was a sign of our failure as a civilized society etc. etc.

And now you know why my co-workers get That Look when I open my mouth in any sort of discussion that touches on social politics.

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We Built This Team on Murder and Silliness

2021-04-17T17:19:00Z

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.

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The Weird Is Among Us

2020-05-02T05:02:52Z

I'm not sure much happened on Thursday--but if it did, it got knocked out of my memory by the weirdness that was today. Not even connected weirdness, but just a sequence of random weirds.

Woke up from a very vivid dream that...well, here's the summary from facebook: I’m at a science fiction convention at a downtown hotel. The guest of honor is a dragon. But nobody had counted on the fact that the dragon is not simply intelligent and clever, but also cruel and hungry. The con com is trying to negotiate with it on the matter of not eating the membership while said membership tries to go about the business of the con. Somewhat furtively to avoid catching the eye of the dragon That’s when the large Pleistocene-era tigers and wolves started roaming the streets. Less intelligent than the dragon but just as hungry. They hadn’t figured out how to open the glass doors of the hotel lobby but neither could we figure out how to lock them. So the tigers and wolves kept pacing past, looking into the lobby hungrily as we froze in place to try to avoid stimulating their pounce reflexes Someone suggested that rather than hanging out in the lobby we should go to the film festival, except the festival was specializing in jump-scare horror flicks and somehow that didn’t seem appealing at the moment.

It has been suggested that the first part of the dream might make an interesting flash fiction piece. I'll keep it in mind, but probably won't find the time.

Next up, did an early morning shopping run to deliver to Stockton tomorrow. Hitting the grocery store at 6am doesn't seem to be necessary for finding essentials any more, and they're still putting out the fresh produce at that hour (I almost missed getting lettuce) so maybe I'll try later in the day next time. I found everything on Earl's shopping list this time, with only one notable substitution. Also had a random encounter with threadwalker who spotted my car in the parking lot and texted me.

The first half of the workday was pretty normal. My lunch bike ride was normal. I used the first bit of sourdough culture discard to make crumpets for lunch. (Needs practice, but delicious with marmelade.) I was planning spend the second half of the day pushing an investigation up to ready-to-review, so of course instead I got two new assignments over lunch. New assignments get top priority because they need to be evaluated for criticality. These involved some QC results that needed review, which sent me into updating my completely-unofficial-not-validated-seriously-just-for-my-personal-reference spreadsheet of purification QC results that I've been keeping up since the time when I belonged to that department.

And as I'm entering data, I notice something really odd. There's a test that sorts out a particular feature of the drug molecule into five different types and calculates what percentage of each type is present in a particular batch. The results are reported to the tenths place. And for this one batch, all the digits in the tenths place were zero. So it was like (made-up numbers): 47.0%, 25.0% 17.0%, 1.0%, 10.0%. It struck me that there were two possibilities. One was that by pure coincidence, this particular set of test results genuinely did come out rounded to figures with a zero in the tenths position. Or there had been some glitch and the numbers got rounded to the units position but then reported to the tenths place. The first is statistically odd, but the second suggests a complete failure of our validated calculation software. So I pinged the lab manager, pointed out the oddity, and asked if he could double-check it. He agrees it's odd and goes to look at the raw data. Well, as it happens improbable probability was the answer and the numbers were genuine and correct. Which is a big relief. But I don't feel the slightest bit of guilt at questioning them. Because I've had to investigate the consequences when the answer is "the software is rounding the numbers wrong and has been for the last couple years." It's not pretty.

That took me up to almost time for our departmental online happy hour, so I popped into the back yard to pick some mint for a mojito and went to wash it in the kitchen sink.
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and nothing happened. No water. Nothing. I went and checked the bathroom sink. Nothing. I went out into the front yard to try the faucet there and look to see if there were any signs of water system disaster. Nothing. What the hell. I find the customer service number for the water company and call to report. They pass me off to an engineering department line that is only taking voicemail. I suspect that the voicemail will not be listened to until Monday, so I try a different customer service number and they tell me to call the emergency service number. (Water company emergency number, not 911.) Emergency operator says he'll call an engineer at home and have them contact me. In the meantime, I've logged on to the video happy hour and babbled a bit about what's going on.

Phone back from the engineer. He's checked status and no larger problems reported so he says it sounds like someone turned off the main house valve. Might someone else in my household have done that? Um...the cats don't have opposable thumbs, and they don't go outside where the valve is in any event. But he talks me through identifying and describing the cut-off valves by the front door, and sure enough, one of the two valve levers visible in the system is in the "off" position. When I align it with the piping, water begins flowing again.

So the best I can figure out is that sometime between 2pm and 4pm this afternoon, some random person came up to my front door shut off my water valve. For unknown reasons. Beats the hell out of me. But I'll know what to check first next time.

At that point, I thanked the engineer, rejoined the video happy hour, and spent a couple hours in social chat with my co-workers.

And that's what my day was like. How about yours?

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And then sometimes I feel accomplished anyway

2020-04-30T04:36:51Z

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.

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The weekend doesn't actually begin until 9am Saturday

2020-04-18T01:07:04Z

So far, every deadline, deliverable, and disaster this week has been met and conquered. Now all I have to do is read an entire novel this evening for the interview tomorrow morning. Once the interview is done, I'll probably do the same thing I did last Saturday: completely veg out and binge-watch something for the rest of the day.

We had a surprise "online departmental happy hour" Thursday end-of-day in combination with our QA partners. Alas, I had to forego the Adult Beverage because of the pending Stockton drop-off. I managed to acquire the entire paternal and fraternal shopping list in some approximate form except for the thermometer. Enjoyed the peculiar lack of traffic on Hwy 4 even during a weekday "rush hour" and had a nice (properly distanced) chat after delivering the groceries before coming home again and falling into bed.

Due to logistics, deadlines, and the fact that the few people working on-site in Berkeley being overworked, I had to actually drive into work today after lunch in order to stand over people as they reviewed and signed off some paper documents, so I could scan them to attach to my investigation report (due to close over the weekend). In a bit of a brain-fart, the distraction of interim screening procedures at the gate caused me to forget about the bit where they have to reactivate your security badge if you haven't been on site for two weeks. (It's been five.) So after I'd gone and parked by my building at the opposite end of site, I had to go back to the security office for badge activation.

After dealing with the paperwork, I took the opportunity to swing by my desk and pick up some stuff that I would have taken previously if I'd realized WFH would go on this long. (Mostly my stash of snacks and lunch supplies. They might not go bad, but I'd had to attract vermin.) That gave me the opportunity to actually sit in the same room as another human being and chat for a little while. It was weird and yet weirdly normal.

I could have popped my laptop into the dock at my desk and finished out the afternoon there, but my brain has re-imprinted on my home office as "where I get work done" and I was afraid I'd strip a mental gear. On my way home I succumbed to an impulsive junk-food urge and picked up a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken and side dishes for a lunch/dinner. Not the best choice, but not the worst either.

And now I need to read. And not fall asleep in the middle of it.

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The Day Job

2020-02-22T04:32:23Z

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.

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Investigation-a-palooza

2019-12-11T04:11:35Z

So my department (and our QA partners) held an intensive "investigation closure" session today to try to power through some of the (theoretically) more simple investigations we have in our backlog. Out of approximately 100 investigations, half of them were "low impact" items scheduled for focused attention. Of those, we managed to close about 60%. The theory is that this will free up attention and resources to work on the remaining deviations. The problem I see is that we close all the "low hanging fruit" and now are left will all the investigations that require more resources and more support from other departments. So we look good (in terms of numbers) in the short run, but I don't know that it makes any difference in the long run. And yet everyone will point to the numbers for this event and say, "See, you could do this all the time if you tried."

Gah.

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15 Years: Is it that Long?

2019-06-05T14:54:04Z

[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.

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