Career Fragments & the Train Wreck

Well here I am, a year plus since I left my full-time job and moved to a completely different state to become a stay at home mom. As inevitably happens, I have kept in touch with a number of my co-workers, and their occasional diatribes and updates about the situation at my former workplace leads me to study (again) my feelings about the experience and the fragments of my career.

It would not be fair to say that working as a postdoc at the institute shattered my career. Rather, it was a tediously slow process of crumbling it, such as it was. I'm not going to pretend I had a glorious, glittering pathway ahead of me, nor can I say with certainty that I knew exactly what I wanted. I give part of the credit for that to God, because surely He was changing my mind about the whole career treadmill the entire way through grad school and then my two equally disastrous postdocs (each in their own way). You will notice that I say "treadmill", because I do believe that a career, however fulfilling you may find it, doesn't really take you anywhere in the end and it's worth reminding myself of that when I think about it with some sniff of longing. In the big scheme of things a job is what it is--a job, a means to an end. Sometimes you work at a job you really love, but if you wouldn't still do it without a paycheck then is it really something you love?

Anyway, I digress. I was talking about my job at the institute last night with DH and I expressed again that it did make me sad, how something that could have been so great and maybe just a little bit glorious (and here I refer to the team effort for the project, which had it succeeded would have indeed created something a little bit glorious, pushing forward the technology for forensics as it would have) was doomed to fail so completely. One of the dangers of doing postdocs is that you are pretty much required to publish papers from it...and a lack of papers from my 2nd postdoc spells out F-A-I-L-U-R-E quite loudly and clearly to all and sundry in academia and some industry. It is irrelevant whether the postdoc him- or her-self is solely responsible for the failure, the fact is that a postdoc is still in a training/trial period and the failure to publish is weighed heavily on his/her shoulders.

it is with me. If I were ever to want to return to my career as a scientist (such as it was, really the cusp of cygnet into swan, if I were being generous) I would have to do another postdoc in academia if I wanted an academic career...and I might have to do one in industry too, from the way the job market for chemists is going. And that is depressing, quite frankly. To spend five and a half years in grad school, then six months in a hellish postdoc, and then three years in a more likable work environment but with absolutely NO progress and complete dependency on others' work ethic (or lack thereof!!), and to end up on the losing side is really quite crappy, to be blunt. So the selfish/human side of me is waiting for those responsible to be punished, because I still succumb at times to the expectation that there WILL be some fairness in life and those who treat others poorly will receive their just reward in this life.

So now it seems that perhaps that inevitable train wreck is coming for those in power who knew about the abundance of problems at my workplace and did absolutely nothing to rectify them. It seems that the two contracting parties are coming for a visit, and the view from the nosebleed seats (read: those who still work there but have absolutely no say in what goes on) looks like there will be a sword drop. I have heard murmurings that the institute is trying to fire my old boss, and I would be lying if I didn't think that would help tremendously. But frankly there is another person there, who is apparently on leave now, who took all the credit for everyone's work and who out and out LIED about results. Unbelievably, this person has gotten away with it for more than four years. I am hoping that some justice falls on this person, who is so smarmy in dealing with co-workers that they are all celebrating this person's absence during his/her leave!! Crazy.

I wish I could be a fly on the wall when the visit takes place in mid-August, but that is just me being selfish and giving in to my small remaining lump of anger. The further removed I am from that chapter of my life, the less I care...but I do care about my friends still there who have to put up with that nonsense still. If only for their sakes, I hope some big changes for the better ARE forthcoming.