Signs that it’s time to consider leaving your job

• One day, while working one-on-one with one of your male coworkers, he comments that “you’re so quiet – you’re going to make some man very happy someday.” You politely explain to the coworker that this doesn’t pass as a compliment, but he’ll hear none of it. You assume that his wife nags him a lot. You continue to work with him, but peg him as an ignorant dude with sexist tendencies.

The next day, your male boss makes nearly the exact same comment in the lunch room, with all of your coworkers as witnesses. You give him your best “you’re crazy” look just before the previous day’s quotable coworker says, “That’s exactly what I told her yesterday, and she got mad at me!” The two of them become engaged in a heated discussion about the merits of a quiet wife as you silently munch on your peanut butter and jelly sandwich, occasionally glancing up from the Stephen King book you’re reading. You vow to quit your job if one more person tells you that you’ll make people happy if you keep your mouth shut.

• Two weeks after you start a job, your superior informs you that he or she is not actually licensed to work in his or her profession at the moment. In fact, his or her license has been suspended. You realize that continuing to work in this situation is going to completely dash any hopes you’d had of running for public office.

Then you realize that you never really wanted to run for public office anyway.

• The CFO of the company enjoys sneaking up behind you to play with your hair while you’re trying to work.

Spreading awkwardness wherever I go

Today, as I was walking across campus to run a quick errand, I was sidetracked by a sign advertising a blood drive in the basement of the SEL. So like a kid distracted by a shiny object, I forgot about my errand and instead lined up for my routine bloodletting.

It ended up working out quite well, as I got to be stuck with a needle a couple times in lieu of being whined at by the 11:30 class I TA. I know this is very irresponsible of me, donating blood when I should be sacrificing my sanity to the 11:30 section, but I think I’ll be able to live with it.

The students are currently working on their team projects during class time. I’ve been trying to encourage them to be creative with their group presentations, because otherwise, these presentations tend to be a big snoozefest. A lot of the time, students will Photoshop the professor’s face into other photographs, insert them into their PowerPoint show, and integrate these fabricated images into the story they’re telling. That is, at least the most memorable groups do.

When I finally got to class, I decided not to spend my entire time in the classroom cowering behind the computer cupboard as I usually do, so I roamed around the room a bit to see what kinds of fun the students were creating. As I walked to the back of the room to retrieve something from the printer, I passed a student who was looking at online photographs of an excessively muscular man flexing, clad only in one of those frighteningly tiny undergarments that bodybuilders wear.

“Eek!” I said, imagining that the 75-year-old professor’s face was going to be pasted onto that body. “Those are some scary pictures!” I should also admit that I have a longstanding fear of large muscles. I chalk it up to some traumatic childhood experience, the memory of which I’ve repressed.

I’d visibly startled the student with my comment, and he immediately exited out of the image window. Any student who happened to be watching my facial expressions as I continued toward the printer would have witnessed the rapid sequence of my amusement, confusion, realization, then horror.

Those photographs were of that student. And I’d just told him that he looked scary.

I tried to sneak past the student as I walked back to the front of the room, hoping that the incident would never be mentioned ever, ever again. As I passed him, he said nervously, “Sorry, you caught me off guard!”

My response, “Um, yeah. Me, too,” was dripping with mortification – I couldn’t make eye contact with him without convulsing into a full-body cringe. I continued to shuffle back to the front of the room, back to my safety zone behind the computer cupboard, which is where I stayed for the remainder of the class.

Gym socks and beans

If I didn’t know any better, I could’ve sworn I spent a good portion of today with a smelly gym sock pulled over my head.

I think we’ve hit the point in the quarter where some of the less fastidious engineering students have cut back on their showering and/or laundering of clothes. At one point during my six hour stint of TAing, one of the other TAs came up to me and said, “You know that smell that some houses get if they have too many cats living there? Well, someone in the back of the room smells like a house with too many cats.” And people wonder why my appetite comes and goes.

In related news, last week I was asked by the director of the freshman engineering program how I manage to stay awake through six hours of TAing. The other TAs and I had been discussing this topic the prior week, and our survey said: “Chew gum.” Probably not what he wanted to hear, but it was our top response. I added, “Talk to students!” for good measure. During exceptionally dragging, stinky afternoons like today’s, I spend much of the time planning the evening’s running route and getting excited about being able to fill my lungs with somewhat fresh air. Tonight’s sunset was particularly stunning, which was a lovely backdrop to a great run.

The running is especially helpful in keeping me as sane as possible, as the students become increasingly panicky in the later classes. I was talking with one of my old history professors and a retired political science professor last Friday about the feedback they’ve been getting from students over the past five, ten, twenty years. I’m disheartened to report that the general consensus is that current students require a lot more hand-holding than previous classes did. While I’m glad that it’s not occurring only in the classes I work with (giving one-on-one instruction to some twenty or thirty students throughout every class is exhausting – plus, I’m not that big into holding hands in the first place), it’s still disappointing. No amount of Seinfeldian “Serenity now!” seems to help.

Last week, when a solid fourth of the last afternoon class was up in arms over the demands being placed on them by a class that hasn’t changed its syllabus in over ten years (the chorus of this class, if it were a song: “We’re never going to use Fortran after this class! Why do we have to learn it?”), I had a little sit-down with them to explain the purpose of the course: problem solving. “The Fortran code is just there to scare you,” I said. “Approach the problem as if you were solving it in English. Ignore the Fortran. We’re just looking for you to use your brains and utilize outside resources to solve these problems. We can help you with the Fortran later.” They looked at me skeptically, and I knew I’d see all of them in my office hours the next week, panicking over the Fortran code.

If only they knew how many times my knowledge of the dietary habits of the Pythagoreans has come in handy over the years. A ten-page paper and forty-five minute presentation on a topic not of my choosing? Undertaken with no complaints? Seriously, more people should know about those wild and crazy ancient mathematicians/music theorists/philosophers who were afraid to eat beans – because, of course, when one passes gas, a little part of one’s soul is expelled, too.

High five, emphasis on the “five”

My internship ended on Friday, and I’ve spent the weekend settling in back in Columbus. There are few things I hate more than moving (circus peanuts, centipedes, and the inappropriate use of apostrophes being three of them), but my moving day went pretty smoothly: one hour of strategically loading the car, two hours of driving, and then one hour of hauling my stuff up a couple flights of stairs. I’m still not sure where everything is – being away from my apartment for three months has disoriented me – but I figure that everything will turn up eventually. Or I’ll just end up with three large boxes of raisins in my cupboard…ahem.

The last day of my internship was uneventful. I spent most of the day working with another batch of those marshmallowy pieces I worked with at the beginning of the term. I began to get annoyingly sentimental as the day wore on, all “This is the last time I’ll walk down the blue aisle of the shop floor!” and “That was the last time one of the shop floor guys is going to say something really strange to me!” not to mention, “That’s the last time I’ll hear the guy on the other side of my cube screech ‘CAW! CAW!’ out of nowhere – oh, no, wait a second, he just did it again.” Two Mikes and a Not Mike gave me a going-away present of a story-laden lecture about what I can expect as I embark on my latest career choice. Words of advice from Manager Mike: “Keep your expectations low.” I totally needed to hear those words one day earlier. The incurable optimist in me will be working on that concept.

Last summer, near the end of my internship, I happened to slice my index finger open on the abrasive saw. To be clear, it wasn’t actually the saw that cut me, it was the housing of the saw. I put a little too much weight into the wrench as I tried to pry the nut off the wheel, and the next thing I knew, I was thinking very calmly, “Oh crap, I’m going to need stitches.” I wrapped a wad of paper towels around my finger and applied pressure, trying to subtly elevate my hand above my heart without drawing too much attention to the fact that oh-my-God-my-fingertip-was-going-to-fall-off. Unfortunately, one of my favorite heat treat guys came in then and started chatting with me, and if you’ve ever seen me talk, you know that if I wasn’t allowed to wave my hands around or make any facial expressions, I’d have nothing to say. So there I was, talking with my hands and trying to play it cool, my bloody and mummified left index finger tucked firmly into my left fist, and all the heat treat guy could do was watch my left hand and wonder what I was hiding. Luckily, he didn’t ask any questions (or report me to our militant EHS lady) and instead, left me to contend with my finger. I’m happy to report that my finger didn’t fall off, nor did I require stitches (even though it may have been a good idea – but I’ve been terrified of stitches ever since the whole stitches-up-the-nose incident in grade school), and it took only three months before my fingernail looked normal again. So the moral of this story is: wear gloves when working with machinery. The buffer zone between torn nitrile gloves and missing fingertip is smaller than you think.

Breaking my heart

Overheard in my office (although I have the feeling it could be overheard in any office):

Female engineer: “You know who’s definitely gonna be our boss someday? Jane Intern.*”

Male engineers: “Why do you say that?”

Female engineer: “She can talk. And she’s smart…”

Male engineer: “And she’s gooood-lookin’!”

All: “Yeah, you’re so right!”

Meanwhile, I was sitting one cube over, like an unfavored daughter within earshot of her parents talking about their favorite child.

What disappoints me most is that I expected better from them.

*Name changed, obviously.

God Save the Queen

This morning, as I walked down the main aisle of the cubicle farm in which I work, I found myself following a shop floor worker toward the hallway. When he turned to hold the door open for me, I had nothing on my mind besides making it to the restroom in time, so when he opened his mouth to start talking to me, I hoped he was just going to say “hello” and be done with it. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

“Every time I see you, I think, ‘She’s gotta be from England!’” he said to me.

This confused me. There’s nothing overtly English about me – if anything, people comment on my Irish appearance (the whole reddish hair, blue eyes, paler-than-pale skin thing).

“So, are you English?” he asked.

Again, I gave him a perplexed look. “Um…well, I’ve got some English blood in me,” I replied, giving a shout-out to the less acknowledged faction of my Western European mutt-ness. “Why do you ask?” I braced myself for the answer.

“Whenever I see you, I think, ‘Wow…she walks like the Queen of England!’” With this, he demonstrated one of those screwing-in-the-lightbulb-style waves while holding his chin high in the air. I tried not to burst out laughing, or run away screaming, and made a beeline for the restroom instead. He shouted after me, “Have a great day!” to which I barely eked out a “Thanks.”

There is so much that is so bizarre about this.

First of all, I tried my best to extract from his comment a compliment on my body carriage. This is especially amusing because I was told over the weekend that I had a “dainty” way of carrying myself, which I thought was hysterically funny. Dainty people don’t trip over uneven sidewalk while running and hit the ground like it’s a Slip ’n Slide. The Queen of England doesn’t get her bike’s handlebars caught in a chain-link fence and fall off her bike backwards. I’m the kind of person who rides her friend’s scooter down a hill as a kid and somehow face-plants onto a patch of gravelly asphalt, suffering wounds that require stitches up her nose. Anyway, I’d like to think that he’s not trying to say that I walk like an 82-year-old woman.

Secondly, who is this guy? Apparently he’s seen me around, but I don’t remember having seen him before. He had this strange little updo going on with his hair, which is something I definitely would have remembered.

And third, I am a window-washer waver, or sometimes just a high-fiver, NOT a screw-in-the-lightbulb waver. See this self-portrait.

I guess what I learned today is that having good posture is an exclusively English trait – or that maybe I should just start slouching around the shop floor guys.

Beta boogers and other unpleasantries

Today, Manager Mike used the phrase “beta boogers” to describe the microstructure and phases present in the titanium sample a supplier sent over. See, Manager Mike speaks my language. What produces a clearer picture in your mind: “significant porosity” or “big, gaping holes”? How about “ultrasonic cleaner” or “vibrating water bath”? “Elongated beta phase particles” or “beta boogers”? I rest my case.

I broke another abrasive wheel this afternoon. This brings the count up to four for the summer. At least my success rate on the cut-off saw is getting better – that day when I broke two wheels in the process of making one cut was pretty pathetic. And last summer, if I got to each Thursday having broken only four abrasive wheels that week, I was pretty pumped. Apparently, engineers take one look at me and decide that I’m fully capable of cutting through something as impossible to clamp as a ball bearing – or maybe they can just see that I’m gullible enough to try.

Also, I did a little microhardness testing this morning. Nothing takes me back to my first few weeks on the job last summer quite like microhardness testing. I sat in front of that machine for days upon days, repeatedly indenting the surface of each sample and then measuring each indent, over and over again. People passed by unnoticed, unless they disrupted my hardness-testing-induced coma by wondering aloud how I could stand to do something so boring for so many hours straight.

My customary response to questions regarding my high threshold for boring activities involves gesturing toward my brain and saying, “Dude, it’s a party in here!” Sometimes, though, that only invites further inquiries concerning the content of the party, and at this point, the party begins to feel as though someone ripped the record right off the turntable.

“So what are you daydreaming about?” the party-crasher asks.

I wait a beat and reply, with a straight face, “Investments.”

That usually moves them along.

Las cucarachas

Up until this past year, I’d had the pleasure of not having had any close encounters with cockroaches since my ill-fated Girl Scout camping trip of 1992. I’d hear stories from classmates at OSU about their little friends skittering back into the darkness whenever they’d turn on their kitchen or bathroom lights. These stories would make me feel grateful that I lucked out in the apartment arena and didn’t have any creepy critters running around. [An aside: That’s not exactly true. I did end up having a star boarder in the form of a mouse at my apartment during my (first) senior year. The contraband weekend cat we had was the one who discovered the post-poison-pellet body of the little guy once rigor mortis had set in. Unfortunately, I was the first human to discover the dead mouse when I blindly reached down to pet the cat.]

Watts Hall, where the MSE department is headquartered, is a bit of a crusty old building. There are routine e-mails sent out to the department updating us on the status of perpetual problems such as our rarely-functioning elevators, the wonky heating and cooling system, and occasionally unexpected events such as second floor floods. There’s a group that’s left off the e-mail list, though, even though they’re as much a part of the MSE department as Professor Dregia or even Gary in the foundry. This group is our resident posse of cockroaches.

Before you get weak-kneed at the thought of having to put up with cockroaches as study buddies, let it be said that I was unaware of the problem until this past fall quarter when I happened to be running up the Watts-MacQuigg stairwell to class and found one, belly-up, on the landing of the third floor. Shortly after, I ran into the TA for the class and mentioned the disgusting beached roach, and he seemed rather indifferent about the news. Apparently, the roaches are the rebellious teenagers of the MSE family, throwing wild parties on the weekends while feasting on the leftovers from Doughnut Fridays [See that, prospective students? We have doughnuts every Friday!] and then passing out in the stairwells, hung-over from all of the sugar.

So why am I writing about this now? Because even GE has cockroaches, albeit much bolder cockroaches than those from Watts.

About a month ago, as I was walking down the main hallway in the building that houses the majority of the materials labs, I noticed a dark leaf blowing haphazardly across the hall. In my sleep-deprived state, I somehow put two and two together and realized that this could not be a leaf, as: a) it was not yet autumn, and b) there is no breeze in Building 500. I took a closer look and sure enough, it was a roach, drunkenly weaving its way across the hall. For a moment I considered poking my head into the adjacent office of my section leader from last summer to request her intervention, but quickly realized that the interruption would most likely not be appreciated. Plus, her shoes were probably as worthless at stomping on roaches as mine were (this was during the pre-steel toe era). As a result, I turned and ran away from the bug as fast as possible.

Earlier this week, I was participating in a few rounds of interviews for a potential position at GE. After my first interview, I exited the room only to be met by a cockroach that was repeatedly running into the wall. I turned on my heel, thinking that my interviewer might have a solution for this little mixed-up fellow, maybe in the form of a crushing blow to the head, but thought better of it. I could imagine the last line of his notes from my interview: “Caitlin seems to be unwilling to assume responsibility for solving problems of the cockroach variety. She would not be well-suited for work at any of our older, crustier facilities.”

Yesterday, after turning in my timecard, I walked down the dark, barren hallway of the basement of the building in which I work. As I neared the door to exit the building into the beautiful light of day, something familiar caught my eye. It was the same shade of brown as the floor, but it wasn’t moving. Crouching down to get a better look, I greeted the belly-up cockroach. “Hey, little guy!” I said. He didn’t respond.

Perhaps there is a Doughnut Friday at GE that I haven’t yet heard about.

The new kid in town

Those who know me know that I have a weakness for sneakers. If I could wear sneakers to work without feeling like a total bum, I would. These summers of closed-toe dress shoes have made me especially fond of wearing sneakers in my down time. I like it when my feet feel as though they’re being hugged by old friends.

Here are some of those friends:

As of today, though, there’s a new kid in town:

GE shop floor-mandated steel toe shoes.

When Manager Mike mentioned the steel toe shoe requirement in a meeting a few weeks ago, he’d also mentioned that the selection of shoes at the Red Wing store had improved greatly over the past few years. Feeling optimistic, I drove over to my local Red Wing store this evening to scope things out. The clerk brought two pairs of work boots out for me to try on.

“Do you happen to have anything a little more sneaker-ish?” I asked him while casting a longing look at a sneaker-ish steel toe shoe displayed on the wall.

“I’ll check,” he said, and disappeared into the stockroom. When he reappeared empty-handed, he said, “Sorry – that’s all we have in women’s.”

I should’ve known better. Twenty styles of men’s shoes, and only two styles for women, one of which is not kept in stock – when will the world catch on that there are women working in engineering these days?

It’s a twofer!

Like Buster Keaton, only not

The other day, I was deburring some metal samples on the belt sander at work. I was working with a piece that was fairly small, sanding away at the little metal splinters left from cutting the piece off with an abrasive saw, when suddenly the sample disappeared. I stood staring at the belt sander in disbelief for a moment before it registered in my mind that the sample was not going to loop around on the belt and reappear on the opposite end as if I were in a cartoon, and I finally turned the machine off. I’d never had to plunge into the bowels of the sander before, so I inspected its exterior to figure out just how I was going to open it up. Prying the side of the machine off, I crouched down to get a closer look and was met face-to-face with, and I believe this is the technical term, industrial gunk. Before I realized just how wet and thick the gunk actually was, I stuck my hand in there (gloved, of course – do not discount the importance of wearing gloves around machinery!) and pawed blindly for my sample. This got me nowhere pretty quickly, although I did find a chunk of metal that had probably been marinating in there since 1978. Anyway, I spotted some wide tongue depressor-ish things on the workbench nearby, so I grabbed them and then went at the gunk like I was a grade school nurse checking students’ scalps for lice. After accidentally flipping the sludge on myself, I located my sample and rescued it from the depths of gunkdom. Upon standing up, I smacked the back of my head into some ventilation piping that was coated with industrial fluff. Figuring that I was now sporting a sizable amount of said industrial fluff in my hair, I reached up to scoop it off and caught myself just before I applied a layer of the gunk, which was still coating my gloves, to my hair. Who knows – maybe it would work as a deep conditioner. I don’t want to be the one to find out.

I’m thinking it might be time to start selling tickets to watch me using the cut-off saw and belt sander.

What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate

Sometimes, when one works in an office setting, conflicts arise. Sometimes, people don’t communicate clearly, or frequently, or respectfully, or at all. Sometimes, this makes it very difficult for jobs to get done when and how they need to get done.

Don’t be one of those people.

I suppose one has the right to spend his or her days belching negative chi into the atmosphere. But like the modern-day quest to offset one’s carbon footprint, what about offsetting one’s contribution to the world’s lousy mood? Be kind, people. Be kind.