Yesterday was such a good day at work, it was a shame I didn’t have the energy to make more of it. I was up at the crack of dawn, much to the chagrin of my self-destructing body, to put the finishing touches on a progress report for my technical monitor at the company funding my research. It was one of those ironic progress reports, where the end result was “not much accomplished,” though not for lack of trying; it’s just that the task at hand was much harder than expected. The boss and I then had our teleconference with said technical contact, and during the course of explaining just how tricky the analysis was becoming, the customer said, “Oh, wow, I didn’t even know you could do that. You’ve definitely taught me something new today, at least.” It wasn’t anything brilliant, but it was a way of performing an analysis on some rather persnickety software by tricking the software into doing something it didn’t really want to do — software that was developed in the lab in which our customer had earned his PhD, based on a dissertation largely about these kinds of simulations. And it was enough for the boss to quietly pat me on the back while the speakerphone rattled on and on about the ins and outs of other analyses we should probably run and the myriad ways we might run them.

It’s so damn rare that I get any positive feedback from my advisor that I practically felt like my dog getting patted on the head for doing something right. Most of the time, all I hear about is how long I’ve been here and how urgent it is that I hurry the hell up and graduate; apparently, I am ruining my advisor’s batting average, already some 17 months past his string of four-years-and-out graduates or something. While many advisors have a bad habit of keeping their grad students around indefinitely for the low-cost labor, the fact that I haven’t settled on some lackluster topic and knocked out a half-assed tome to get the heck out of here is driving mine out of his gourd, and he doesn’t let an opportunity pass to let me know it. So as minor as my accomplishment was yesterday, I impressed myself, and I impressed the boss. But I wasn’t about ready to turn that into any kind of momentum, because my body was demanding a nap and I think I was making my officemate nauseous with the sound of my hacking. After a couple of meetings, I sat down at the computer to set up one more ambitious computer model and leave it to run overnight.

This morning, I slept until almost eleven, having decided to turn off the alarm clock and let my body take as much rest as it wanted in the hopes of waking up decidedly less sick. I woke up pretty much still sick, but guzzled several cups of coffee until I had the energy to ride up the hill to the office for a few hours. There were a couple of things that had to get done today, and I should have been able to get them overwith in relatively short order and feel all warm and fuzzy about another fruitful day of research. Unfortunately, the machine shop manager I needed to talk to took off earlier than expected for his week-long vacation, and the computer model from yesterday was still chugging away after 22 hours. By the time I gave up and went home, it was 27 hours into the analysis with no sign of stopping before the wee hours of tomorrow. Lucky for me, the piece of crap building I work in, with its constantly-being-overhauled wiring, plumbing, and paneling, is scheduled for a power outage at 8am due to electrical system maintenance. If the computer doesn’t make this deadline, I’ll have to go back in there on a Saturday night to restart what is apparently at least a 41 hour analysis. No, I’m not grumpy at all about this.



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