Invisible work

If you have read a few of my posts on this blog you have probably realized that I am weary of any and all structures of power, not because they are intrinsically evil, but because they can be used for evil purposes, so a carefully designed system of checks and balances is necessary to keep them under control. One frequent way these structures exert their power is by pure and simple denial: if a citizen says something and the government (in whatever applicable level) says otherwise, the public opinion and, in all likelihood, history as well, will almost always side with the government.

One famous example of this denial comes from the (in-)famous 1949 novel by English author George Orwell "Nineteen eighty-four", where the Ministry of Propaganda regularly re-writes the newspapers to adapt their content to the official truth, because printed text seems a much more reliable evidence than the testimony of a witness, even if its ink has just finished drying. The result of this denial is that certain situations become invisible.

Photo: Ricky Montalvo

Invisible is, in many cases, the situation of those women who live in a environment of permanent domestic violence: by the failure of the mass media and the authorities to admit that this is a problem, we all become blind to their suffering and excuse the situation with "white lies" that do not help the victim and only increase the chances of a fatal ending.

Invisible is also the work of many housewives that spend their days toiling on endless household chores without a sign of appreciation. Comments, if ever, are addressed at the incorrect execution of one of more tasks, that might have provided sub-par results: the dinner is cold, the clothes are not well ironed, the baby is still awake... But there is never a word of appreciation to all the things that had been done to full satisfaction, because they are taken for granted.

Invisibility, however, is not an exclusively feminine "privilege". Anyone tasked with the daunting job of "keeping things running" in whatever line of work suffer the same fate: we only speak of the system administrator when the server is down, the cleaning crew when hour trashcan has not been emptied and the intelligence services whenever there is a terrorist attack. All these jobs have in common the circumstance that doing a good job results in nobody knowing about it. For instance, the SARS-CoV-2 is not the first corona virus that we have seen since SARS-CoV-1, but thanks to the dutiful work of the health systems in many countries a big majority of the potentially dangerous agents are caught before they become a problem. But then, if they do not become a problem we never hear about them, so COVID-19 might be the results of the 1-in-100 cases where they did not manage to avoid an infection, but that is all we hear about and not the other 99 that were timely fenced off.

I have mentioned before that one of my tasks is to ensure that our instrument runs smoothly. Unfortunately, the incredible pressure from the science team to have every possible acquisition mode ready in time for the active science phase means that we have to take some risks in the operation and occasionally operate the instruments that have not been fully validated on ground, with the result that we occasional stumble. It turns out that yesterday we filled the hard drive of our instrument, so we could not take any more data. Unfortunately this means that the instrument was switched off, because that is the default response in case of an anomaly,  so it will take a couple of days to organize the steps to switch it back on in coordination with the spacecraft team.

This is neither the first nor the second stumble, so the spacecraft team is starting to get pissed by the repeated work they have to face and concerned about out ability to operate reliably. Of course, they are not aware of how much progress we have made in the last 18 months, from a very basic and very slow operation mode to fully automated series of acquisitions that can run for hours on end. Admittedly, it is an error on our side that we allowed the hard drive to run so full that we could not collect any more data, but that does not mean we are not working and making progress on catching most of our operational errors.

Work is hard enough when it receives recognition, going without it makes it harder, but being blamed for the few occasions where the workload has not allowed you to deliver is pretty harrowing. It is good to know that at least part of the team gets to know what I do, but sadly for the big boss my work still largely invisible. Let us see if I manage to change that. Have a nice week.