Above and below the ivory tower

That I am privileged by the education and the professional career that I was able to choose is out of the question. That many people would gladly change menial and physically exhausting jobs for mine is also clear. But that does not mean that knowledge-centered jobs like mine are completely free of problems, and today I am touching on some of them. I am aware that some of you might deem them "first world problems", but I would like to discuss them to show that the grass is not that much greener on the other side of the fence.

One essential part of my job is the cooperation with the rest of the team. The construction and the operation of space instrument is a rather complex enterprise and the sheer width of the expertise needed exceeds the capabilities of any one person. To solve those shortcomings we regularly build multi-disciplinary team where each member brings complementary know-how so that all the bases are reasonably covered. Of course, scientific institutions do not necessary have the budget they would wish, which also means that the bargaining potential in the labor market is limited and some areas have to be covered through the recycling of other collaborators because the project might not be able to find or to afford a dedicated person with the adequate expertise. This means that whoever is in charge of the job is sometimes less than optimally prepared to do it. Admittedly, it is a first world problem when there are so many people who are losing their jobs.

 

Photo: Greg Dunham

A common solution to the limited preparation of the team in the weakest areas is to double the amount of personnel, so that more than one person could look at the work to be done with the hope that one will cover the shortcomings of the other. It is a slightly sub-optimal arrangement because it requires the work to be done 1.5 times (one does it, the other one checks it), but it comes with the additional benefit of the built-in quality assurance. However, this scheme only works when people can collaborate; with so many industries requested to work from home (and we are definitely in the eligible group), working together is not possible anymore, or at lease not with the fluidity of earlier times. Once again, a first world problem where there are so many workers that are forced to come to work in spite of the pandemic because their work cannot be done remotely.

The result of this situation (and I know that this might sound like a terrible pun coming from someone in the space sector) is that my work sometimes feel disconnected, taking place in the void, without any relation with the "real" world or the rest of the team; it seems as if I were doing the work for its own sake, just to keep my schedule full, and I fail at times to see its purpose.

For these feelings of isolation in the ivory tower I have found two main remedies: the first one is flying above the Ivory Tower as in the 1979 novel "The Never-ending Story", riding on the back of books and movies to freshen up my spirit; the second one is climbing down from the tower and taking care of the always necessary groundwork: mowing the lawn, trimming the hedge, hanging a photograph. They might seem lowly and menial, but if the pandemic has showed us one thing is that without the people doing these jobs day in and day out the system breaks and the society collapses. Let me just dedicate a couple of lines to all the truck drivers, supermarket cashiers, municipal employees of every kind, health providers, security forces, which have kept the society running for so many months. The year is about to turn, but the pandemic is not over. I hope the vaccines will eventually help getting the virus under control, but until then I will have to continue to rely on those who have only had a glance of the ivory tower from below. Have a nice evening.