The Goldfish's Logbook

When I was little, my first choice of what I wanted to do when I grew up was an archaeologist. My mom had gotten me this exceptional book on dinosaurs (which I still have) with great color illustrations and anatomical diagrams. At age 7, I couldn't read it (heck, the writing is so dense that I can barely penetrate it at age 27), but the pictures were all I needed. There was this one photo of a woman unearthing an anklyosaur (my favorite dinosaur) fossil and I think that clinched it for me. I've always had a penchant for digging and I think back then I believed that an archaeologist got to keep whatever he dug up. Ha ha. The idea of digging up dinosaurs and buried treasure for a living, oh wow, that would've been a non-stop adventure. And then later on, when someone told me that Indiana Jones was also an archaeologist, well hell, that just sweetened the pot.



When I saw Top Gun, my next choice was to be a fighter pilot. But really, any kind of pilot would've been fine, as long as I got to fly. Even passenger jet pilot. Passengers like barrel rolls, right?
By the time I got to junior high, I didn't really have any career in mind. My thoughts were too occupied with girls and games to think of anything beyond my immediate sphere and future. For high school I went to a magnet school for science and that narrowed the field down for me. As is typical for my sex, both science and engineering appealed to me. Math, though unpleasant, was the language of these disciplines so I tolerated it. I didn't really recieve any sort of career guidance or whatever they call it, so when I exited high school all I had was the vague idea that I wanted to build/create for a living.
I started off in a university not known for engineering. I had no idea of the various schools of engineering and the school only offered electrical and mechanical engineering, so I went with ME. By the end of the first year I'd realized I was in the wrong school and in the wrong field, but at least I'd decided what I wanted to do. Maybe it was the little boy in me making this decision, the boy who liked to dig and play with legos and take things apart with his dad's tools. I wanted to build bridges. That goal might sound mundane to most people, but I wanted to build something great. There aren't any more Pyramids or Panama Canals or Hoover Dams left to be built in this age, so my goal had to be more humble than those. And sure, all the great rivers have been bridged already; that's not the point. Bridges, to me, are the epitome of engineering. They represent our mastery of physics and engineering, spanning the voids and rising above the impassable. Continually they're being built longer, farther, lighter, and higher. Everytime I cross a big bridge I just feel such a sense of awe . . .
Anyways, so I decided to be a structural engineer so that one day I'd be building bridges. But I couldn't just jump directly into being a structural engineer. First I had to be a civil engineer, the general field that includes structural. I graduated in CE and got a job in geotechnical engineering, which basically relates to the foundations of structures. The foundation of any structure (bridges included) is the first and arguably most important component, so even though this wasn't a structural engineering job, I believed it fell in line with my overall goal.
( It sours . . . )

*sigh*

I almost cried at work today, right in front of the superintendent. That might make me a little bitch, but . . . I'm pretty low right now.
This week should've gone off without a hitch. I was assigned to an easy job, one that I've done many times before. So I was confident that I could handle it. Plus, it was an out-of-town job AND in my old hometown, so I could get away from the office and visit my family. A nice coincidence, right? But somehow, something would go blow up in my face each day. The first two days it was about something back at the home office, something that I did over a month ago. I remembered that job, I had felt good about my performance on that job, like it was a feather in my cap. The details don't matter, but each day they would call me about how this problem was mushrooming. My bad memory is my worst flaw, so I couldn't defend myself without my notes or reports, which were back at the office, of course. So my bosses are currently cleaning up my mess.
Then today, the concrete contractor blows up on me. Technically, I didn't do anything wrong. In my head, I knew that. Even the other guys on the jobsite were all, "Don't mind him, he's just hot." But after the week I'd been having, when he tore into me, his words really hit hard. My temporary boss was all, "Don't worry about it, it happens," but still, I felt rotten for the rest of the day.
I've gotta say, I'm not used to feeling like this. Even back in the hormonal tempest of puberty, I wasn't the type to get depressed or insecure, but ever since I've taken this job, fear and sadness have become roommates in my head. I'm not used to having them there. It's been years since they visited and that was only in really dire situations. Like when I got kicked out of college, or stranded in a desert at night, things like that. Now it's almost the daily forecast. I'm so afraid of screwing up that I'm almost paranoid and I've got no confidence in my work. And that bleeds over to non-work time too. They're not panic attacks, but often I get these . . . sensations that I'm in trouble or I've forgotten something important or I've done something wrong. I'm just real spooked and skittish. Whenever I screw up at work, I get bummed out and that blue funk follows me for the rest of the day. One good thing about my ADD/bad memory is that I tend to forget my failures; usually I bounce back pretty quick. If not within a few hours, then by the next day at the latest. But this continuous string of failures has left an impression on me. A cloud of doubt and low esteem just keeps following me. And then I get angry because no matter what I do or how hard I try, I still screw up. Badly. Those three ingredients, sadness, fear, and anger, don't combine to make anything good, I'm afraid.

What a stressful day. I've finally gotten my nerves under control (with the help of a soft serve ice cream), but I feel I should write about it to actively work out the tension. For starters, I've a new responsibility at the work site I'm assigned. The long and short of it, there's an uber-inspector now on the job, and he wants all the junior staff to complete and sign-off on their inspections before he even arrives on-site. Basically we've got to get all our ducks in a row, and in writing, first thing in the morning, so that he doesn't have to concern himself with or wait on, the little details. And guess what his last name is. Bossman. I kid you not. He must be a big cheese, because he's the only man I've ever seen allowed on the job site without full safety gear. Everyone has to wear steel-toe boots, safety vest, safety glasses, and hard hat. He's there in loafers, no vest, glasses, and a hard hat. Anyone else, and they wouldn't have made it past the gate. Everyone's calling him "sir" and shadowing (?) him. But that's not my beef. My irritation was that because of his say-so, now I have to go to the job site two hours earlier when it would only really take an additional fifteen minutes in the morning to meet his requirements.
So I'm driving on my way to the site, still dark of course, and I get a speeding ticket. I didn't see the cop until it was too late. But that ain't my beef. I was speeding, he caught me, end of story. I didn't even curse, just got that instant sinking feeling in my stomach when I saw him pull into traffic behind me. He was even a bit lenient about it. 47 in a 30, but he bumped it down to 40 in a 30, so that I could take defensive driving. (If it's 15+, then DD isn't an option). Not like I have that option, since I took the class less than six months ago, but I appreciated the gesture. What put a cloud over my day is the fact that I was driving a company vehicle. I'll handle the fine myself, but I fear that this violation will get back to the company and it'll be a mark on my record. And my record has taken enough hits as it is. I'm not too eager to crack open the employee literature to find out what repercussions are awaiting me a month or so down the road.
So I get back to work and everything goes to crap. My colleague is reviewing one of my projects, my first one, in fact. The first project that I was given sole responsibility for. The one that I tried so hard to execute flawlessly. And it appears that I fucked it up. Royally. As in, months of time and tens of thousands of dollars wasted. I won't go into details, but for a couple hours there I was fighting very hard to hold my ground and defend the validity and soundness of my work. Since I was the person responsible for the project, if anything was wrong, then I was at fault. Yet, I managed to deflect the various barbs of blame until it appeared that another company may have been the source of the problem. The pit in my stomach deepens. I may be able to explain and defend myself to my co-workers, but to level an accusation at another company, there's no way I could back that up. There wasn't even the slightest crack in their wall. Their response was a resounding, "No. Our work was not wrong." For a few minutes it's a stalemate. And I know that wrecking ball of blame is about to swing back in my direction. And my future seems very clear. Either I get fired, or I get busted down and put on probation for a very long time. Maybe put on probation until they find out about the ticket, which would be the straw that broke the camel's back, and then I get fired. But then the other company sends a document with a minor detail that breaks the whole logjam. Within a matter of minutes, it becomes clear that this bruhaha was all a matter of miscommunication and misinterpretation. I wasn't at fault; there wasn't anything to be at fault about. If anything, this situation was created because someone foreign to the project came in and just happened to step on the one wrinkle out of the whole affair, and blew it up into a catastrophe. My company's veneer is only a little worse for wear, having been seen as momentarily incompetent. Although it was a bad day it could very well have turned out worse, so I count my mere survival as a victory in itself. I've had many of these near-misses in recent weeks; maybe it's a sign that I'm consistently doing something wrong. I just gotta work harder. Or smarter. Whichever, just stop screwing up. If I don't, then all these papercuts will add up to a lethal wound. Now if you don't mind, I'm gonna go find somewhere safe, dark, and quiet to hide for a while.

Anywho, as the most junior and inexperienced "engineer" at my office, I commonly get assigned tasks that are often unskilled, unpleasant, or just low-priority. (I use the term "engineer" loosely. I'm merely an Engineer-In-Training; I might be breaking some law if I referred to myself as an engineer with a capital E.) Last week for example, I was a lone flagman directing traffic around a blind curve from the middle of a state highway. That gave my adrenaline glands a heck of a workout. Those near-misses are not the kind of thrill-seeking I go for.
Starting tomorrow for the next couple weeks I'll be assigned as construction inspector at what is basically a quarry in the middle of downtown. A narrow pit carved into the limestone, forty feet deep by thirty wide. Spending the day in that confined, airless oven with heavy equipment rumbling about all around me . . . it's not very pleasant. But that's not the part that really bothers me. What bugs me is that I'm not qualified for this role. I've never done this sort of thing before, nor did I ever imply that I was so qualified. But we're short-handed, so I've been thrown in to plug the hole. The safety of the building and by extension, the safety of those who will use it depends on the inspector insuring that it is built as required. But I don't know what the hell I'm doing. And the foremen, drillers, and other construction veterans are all hanging on my every word, even though any of them has decades more experience on me. Even a minor screw up can result in thousands of dollars in wasted material, days of downtime, or heaven forbid, lawsuits.
I guess I'm just not accustomed to this level of responsibility and/or stress. My immediate colleague tells me that when he started, it was sink-or-swim for him too. I can't help but think of that altered version, "The best time to learn to swim is when you're drowning." If only it didn't have such a morbid tone.