A New Year, just like the Old Year

I came back from my folk's yesterday afternoon, after not quite two weeks of unwinding and getting to relax. The only significant mental effort required was that needed to take on board advice on my golf swing (better control of the position and grip of the handle) and make sure the beer stocks were consumed before their marked sell-by date. Aside from that, it is always great to be back in the bosom of the family, mother's cooking and all. It's a wrench to come back to an empty house and the certainty of ongoing frenetic workload.

It could be worse. On Monday, my cousin was very quiet. He's now somewhere on his way back to Afghanistan. His mother was quite vociferous about her worries. He's had a new tour of duty hanging over him throughout the break. He's been in the service for a long time now, and spent time in all kinds of potentially dangerous places over the last decade or more. He's not that much younger than me, and I find myself thinking that he's done enough for a man his age. I'm not sure how much time he has left, or whether he might be tempted to extend. I think his wife, stepdaughter and sisters might look him long and hard in the eye before he does.

This morning, I made the mistake of popping into the office, my last day of leave, to check my emails and post before catching a flight to the US tomorrow. Emails aplenty, more mail than I could reasonably digest in a morning, and a cluster of managerial issues and temporary mini-crises seeking help and guidance, besides which, there were any number of people off sick with a variety of seasonal afflictions.

Amidst all the confusion of a day in the office, I pleaded invisibility (I'm not really here y'know) and got on with trying to sort out those things which were necessary and urgent before travelling from those which could wait and those which were still going to be just as much a pain when I had more time to deal with them. So I'm trying to keep focussed on the next week, which should be fairly time-consuming and intensive, aside from trying to keep my circulation going on long-haul to the west coast, and staying awake at LAX long enough to ensure that I get through the usual chaos of customs and immigration with enough time to get to my onward flight.

The annual AIAA bash at Reno (or Aerospace Sciences Meeting) is very much of a goldfish bowl. There's precious little to do except absorb enormous amounts of information and work the policy and funding bazaars until you drop. Many people never see the outside of the conference venue. The mountains are nice, but Reno is there primarily for gambling and the more dubious recreations that take place on the edge of town. This is the last year there; they have twigged that engineers and scientists have a more realistic appraisal of the probability of winning in a casino than the usual crowd.

The usual crop of familiar long-serving greybeards from industry are there, and we buy our friends beers and keep close tabs on our rivals. Information is the currency in which we trade, and codes of honour are maintained by submitting ourselves for scrutiny and evaluation by our peers.

The egos and reputations of senior academics are boosted by getting hard work out of their younger postdocs. The PhD students and postdoctoral researchers are the bright-eyed newbies in this environment. These are the people who are trying to find their own place as individuals, rather than as someone's sidekick or bag carrier. It's very competitive, and the price of failure is obscurity. They have to publish or perish, and if the quality is not good enough, for whatever reason, their credibility suffers. It's emotionally and psychologically brutal. Too frequently, the quality can be poor, and career-limiting for the junior staff involved. Reputations are there to be made, and broken.