Life Is a Trip

Now that the coronavirus has driven us all into isolation, I have been working at home for the past week. So I thought I would share a picture of my new workplace:



This shoe box has become my new office. In it I keep my work-related papers and desk calendar, office supplies, and my work water bottle. I even included some of the family photos that I used to have up in my cubicle.

The most important work tool, of course, is not in the shoe box. It is my computer, now the lifeline connecting me to work and, well, to pretty much everything else in life.

Another tool that I really should have shown is the cell phone. I am so thankful that I finally gave in and got one. When I was discussing the subject with family and friends over Christmas vacation, I'm sure none of us imagined the world we would be living in, within just a few months. But in this new world, we need all the connectivity we can get.

I'm home from work today, because my office is moving. We were given the choice of taking a vacation day or helping to move and set up computers, so I chose the better part of wisdom.

Yesterday as my workmates and I were sitting around, goofing off from packing up our desks, one of them said, "I want to know what's in the messages on Lynn's phone." I guess he had noticed that the red "you've got messages" light has been on my phone for over a year, because I never bothered to learn how to use the voicemail feature. It turns out it's not so hard. After going to a web site to set up my password, all I had to do was to pick up the phone and push the button labelled "Messages." Duh!

So I finally got to find out what was in the messages. It turns out that I was right to assume that I wasn't really missing much by not checking them. In the 16 months I have been working at my current job, I had 12 messages. They were:
* Two messages from co-workers saying something like, "I'll talk to you later."
* Two messages from UPS about setting up a "brokerage account," whatever that is.
* A reminder about a clinic appointment Peter had last April.
* The most interesting was a message from Peter saying, "Hi, Lynn, I'm home. It's 4:00." I wondered why he bothered to call me to tell me he was home, then I realized that it was the day he came home from the hospital after his pulmonary embolism.
* The rest were junk faxes trying to sell me doors and windows.

Which basically tells me that I really don't need to have a phone on my desk. But at least I can now look my phone in the face without that red light shining to remind me that I don't know how to use it.

At our team meeting at work yesterday, the boss told us he had completed our performance evaluations for 2008 (though we won't find out the results for another few weeks yet). He revealed the following facts:

(1) There are 12 people on the team.
(2) 25% of them got 5's (the highest score).
(3) The median score was 3.
(4) The mean was 3.5.
(5) He didn't give any 2's.

I figured out that there are only two combinations of scores that meet all of these criteria:
(a) three 5's and nine 3's
(b) three 5's, two 4's, six 3's, and one 1

It's probably (a), though it is strange that nobody got a 4. But I have a terrible fear that it is (b), and that I am the person who got the 1. Peter says that everyone on the team has probably made the identical calculation and has the identical fear.

I won a prize in another work raffle today - a bottle of Mexican red wine at the Centre for Computational Biology (one of the two departments I work for) holiday party. We got a free lunch and a beer at a kind of bar/poolroom. I played pool with another woman who also had not played in decades, while all these mathematically-minded boys stood around and sneered at us. "It's all about vectors! Vectors!" At least these people had an actual party. In my other department, which is so antisocial they don't even have meetings, let alone parties, the secretary came around and sold raffle tickets, then came around later and gave out the prizes.

It is hard to believe that, in less than three weeks, I will be leaving the job I have held for nearly 19 years. Everything at work seems the same as it always has. I come in each morning, put my container of yogurt in the fridge, get a cup of coffee, settle into my cubicle, do my work. No one treats me any differently than usual. No one even seems particularly anxious about whether I will be able to complete my current assignment before I leave. I did give notice, didn't I?

At present I am working on what is probably the last program I will ever write in the "Natural" programming language - or indeed, in any programming language. After nearly 2 decades as a Natural programmer, I have become virtually unemployable.

Even in the 80s, my employer's choice of Natural for applications development was a questionable decision, like committing to Betamax in a VHS world. Now that mainframe programming of any kind is becoming obsolete, it is more like Betamax in the age of DVDs. My skills, so carefully developed over so many years, are almost completely worthless. I blame my employer for putting me in this position, and I blame myself for not realizing what was happening while there was still time to do something about it.

And yet, I have a certain amount of sympathy for the people who chose Natural (and the people who developed it in the first place), because it really is a nice programming language. I have enjoyed working with it. I find it elegant and, well, natural - a good fit with the way my mind works, without the awkward and annoying circumlocutions necessary in most programming languages. Sometimes, when I'm on a roll, writing code in Natural flows as smoothly and effortlessly as writing prose in English. Maybe this would have happened with any programming language after 20 years or so - who knows? All I can say is, it never happened to me with Cobol, Fortran, or PL/1. And from the little I have seen of object-oriented programming languages, they seem as foreign and impenetrable as Greek or Russian.

Having advanced so far down the dead-end road of Natural programming, it is likely that I have come to the end of my career as a programmer. At my time of life, am I really going to start learning C++, Java, J2EE, VB.net, or whatever it is that programmers are supposed to know nowadays? It seems only a little more plausible than learning Polish or Portuguese. Even if I made the effort, could I compete with young people for whom these are, as it were, their native languages? Not likely!

No - my next job, whatever it is, will probably not be a programming job. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? By sending me down this road, has my soon-to-be-ex employer deprived me of my livelihood, or gotten me out of a rut? A year from now, will I be cursing my fate or celebrating my deliverance? I don't know. All I know is that thinking about these questions makes my brain hurt. Time to fall back on the words of that great philosopher, Scarlett O'Hara. "I can't think about that right now. If I do, I'll go crazy. I'll think about that tomorrow." For the moment - I'd better finish writing that program.

Maybe it’s because I’m planning to move back to Canada, or maybe it’s because I’ve been going through all my old stuff in preparation for moving, but I find myself thinking about my iron ring.

The Iron Ring is a Canadian institution. It is given to people newly qualified as engineers, and there is a ceremony (“private” but not “secret”) called the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, which was written by Rudyard Kipling specifically for Canadian engineers. Once you have been through the ceremony, you are entitled to wear the Iron Ring on the little finger of your working hand, as long as you are working as an engineer. It is supposed to remind you of your sacred obligation to use your powers for the common good instead of for personal gain.

So, I have this ring, which I got when I graduated from McGill in 1977. I stopped wearing it when I stopped working for companies with the word “Engineers” in their names. For the past 25 years it has been gathering dust (but not rust, since it is made of stainless steel) in a box in my bedroom.

But now I am wondering. Would it be appropriate to wear it? Am I still an engineer?

It is actually surprisingly difficult to decide what is or is not engineering. The term covers such a wide range of activities. Just within civil engineering, there is structural, transportation, water resources (my specialty), etc. Then when you consider electrical, mechanical, biomedical, chemical, etc. etc. you see that it is more of a philosophical category than a job description.

So, what is an engineer? Typing this question into Google takes you to a number of web sites aimed at young people considering careers in engineering. These sites offer extremely broad definitions of engineering, with an emphasis on the ethical dimension. For example, “applying technology to human needs,” “performing tasks necessary to bring the benefits of technology to society,” or “creating and maintaining the products and systems necessary to sustain and enhance human life.”

By these standards, I guess what I do could be considered engineering. But so could a lot of other things, such as medicine, or agriculture, or manufacturing. I think what these definitions are missing is the idea of design. An engineer isn’t just someone who uses technological skills to benefit society, or someone who makes the tools for others to use. An engineer is someone who figures out how to make the tools to accomplish the task.

By that definition, I think I have actually been doing engineering for most of my career. I have been designing and building the systems that other people use to accomplish their (presumably socially useful) goals, such as measuring school kids’ academic progress, or scheduling clinic appointments, or keeping track of who has a degree from Brown.

I have tried to do these things with integrity. It has been very important to me to be part of things I believe in, and not to be part of things I don’t believe in. I went into water resources engineering because I wanted to do something useful and important. I left because I discovered that the companies I worked for were mostly engaged in shady business that I didn’t want to be part of. So I switched to computer programming and settled for doing things that were useful, though perhaps not so important. It’s kind of ironic that I stopped wearing the Iron Ring when I started listening to my conscience in matters pertaining to work.

So after considering the matter, here is what I think. I think I could have been wearing the ring all these years. I think I could be wearing it now. But if I manage to accomplish the career move that I am now trying to make – if, for example, I get a job in the Registrar’s Office instead of being the person who creates the systems that the Registrar’s Office uses – then I will no longer be doing engineering. If that happened, I would be a user of technological tools, not a designer of them. If I was wearing the ring, I would have to take off. Since it’s already off, I won’t put it on – at least until I see what kind of work I end up doing next.