Seeking Ferret

As of last Wednesday, I am back to working full-time on-site. I have mixed feelings about this, naturally. On the side of it being relatively safe, we are a tiny company and everyone here is as paranoid as I am about avoiding risky situations, we've implemented protocols to minimize transmission risk including wearing masks, taking everyone's temperature and logging it daily, sanitizing high contact surfaces regularly, and restricting visitors to the company. And New Jersey's infection rate has gone down quite significantly and has continued to drop as we slowly open up more of the state.

On the other hand, no on-site protocol mitigates all risk. The virus is not going away anytime soon, all it takes is some incidental contact in the supermarket for someone to catch it and spread it, and clearly it's transmissible when people are not symptomatic. So I am worrying to some degree. It's also going to make me warier about starting to visit friends and family in low risk ways going forward. The more the chance I might be carrying the virus, the less good an idea that is.


I also separately have mixed feelings about my effectiveness professionally in working on-site vs remote. There are parts of my job that were close to impossible to do remotely, and parts that were much more difficult, because they depended on types of communication that were harder remotely. That led to my boss's decision to say that working remotely was no longer possible. But there were also parts of my job that I got done much more effectively remotely, because of less distractions and, when I was interrupted, more focused interruptions. So I'm going to go back to being frustrated about different things than I was frustrated about when I was working at home.

Too, there were nice fringe benefits of working at home. I'm going to miss being able to bake stuff while I worked. I'm not sure that balanced out against the annoyance of having my work computer taking up half my dining room table and just generally not feeling like I had good separation between work and personal life, but it was nice.

Under pressure from my parents, I took a New York State civil service exam this past weekend. The test would qualify me for a variety of 'Junior Engineer' titles at New York state agencies including the Department of Transportation, the Department of Public Service, and so on. The salary at these positions would be less than my current salary, but the benefits package is far superior, including a defined benefit pension plan and a better vacation package, as well as the job security that comes from the strong NY state public employees unions.

The jobs are also not doing the kind of work I would like to be doing.

Consequently, I did not study very hard. I didn't really mind bowing to my parents' pressure because the commitment of time and money on my part was small enough and it never hurts to have backup plans, but I wasn't going to fully train myself for a job I'm unlikely to take. I believe I did fairly well anyway- aside from a few specialized questions on construction that wouldn't be difficult for someone who'd spent any time on a construction site but which were impossible for me, the questions were sufficiently general about engineering and engineering management that I had no problem with them. I'm good at taking tests. (I read This post on standardized testing and academia and modern culture with fascination: I self-diagnose as someone with fairly minimal TDTPT... I was always in that category that aimed to get the A- and usually got it.) So we'll see what happens.

The experience did get me thinking a bit about the kind of work I actually would like to be doing. The answer I come to is that I would like to be doing exactly the sort of work I am doing now, but paid better and treated better. That seems like a kind of silly thing to say, but it seems likely to me that such jobs are available. I am a reasonably well-skilled engineer with a reasonable amount of work experience, and there are several industries that pay better than mine where one could expect to find jobs with comparable style of work to my present job. And aside from the stupidly breakneck pace that occasionally strikes, I really enjoy my job. I love that I get to design such complicated systems from scratch, I love the process of moving from concept to physical execution, I love that I get to indulge my 'building things' impulse on a limited basis without spending my days doing mentally unchallenging physical work. I feel that presently I am acting a little cowardly by not engaging in a more active job search towards better jobs. On the other hand, I'm quite grateful for the stability of my present job, and it's pleasant and comfortable to work in a job where most of the time, you know what to do. In this economy, I feel quite lucky to have the job that I do. I just know that even in this economy, I probably could find better.




Then on Monday I went to see Die Fledermaus at the Met, in its traditional 'holiday season' English translated version. I'd not seen it before, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. I was nervous when I saw that Jeremy Sams, of the dreadful libretto to The Enchanted Island, was responsible for the English translation, but he did an excellent job on this, producing a libretto full of actually funny English language jokes.

Die Fledermaus is a story about the revenge of Die Fledermaus, a wealthy, mysterious man known as the Bat who carefully maneuvers all the other characters in the story toward his desired destruction of them all. However, Die Fledermaus is not, alas, Bruce Wayne: His plan falls apart in the end to hilarious effect. I was giggling to my friend Jon afterward that it would be very funny to have fic where Bruce Wayne was Die Fledermaus, where every detail of the plan went according to plan because Batman's plans always work. Sadly, this somehow doesn't exist on AO3, which means apparently that I'm nominated to write it. Maybe when I finish my Yuletide.

I'm tempted to say that the best part was the third act opening monologue from the jailer's drunk assistant, a marvel of fourth-wall-violating sketch comedy. But no, the best part was the music, with Strauss's enchanting waltzes and other dances enriched by their context.