Currently lacking focus

I am running a qualification test at the moment, which in this case involves setting up lots of relatively short test periods. Because most of the work is involved in setting up a test, and watching it run for several hours is where the road to tedium lies, this means I am quite busy, which is good. For one thing, being busy in the laboratory gets me out of the crappy office area. I tend to notice more how peaceful and pleasant it is in the lab when I return to the crappy office if only because I would consider the conditions in the lab to be closer to 'normal' instead of 'best workplace ever'.

I also enjoy my work, so getting an intensive test such as the one I am running at the moment lets me enjoy what I do for an extended period. On top of that, I like feeling competent at whatever I undertake to achieve, so it's always good to solve problems and get everything running smoothly. There were some problems with getting some of the vibration periods to run yesterday, caused by the fixture rather than any errors or oversights. Getting it to work taught me a bit more about the software and systems we use and was stimulating.

Unfortunately, after yesterday's efforts in competence I have today been rather lacking. There haven't been any significant errors, but the niggling ones are just as bad, as I shouldn't be making them in the first place. I'm glad I caught the control accelerometers being off-axis before I even tried to power everything up, for instance, but I had to retake the photograph of the set-up showing the accelerometer positions for the test log. I've also had trouble getting the charge amplifier sensitivities correct, and one or two timings for the tests have been wrong.

It's all been insignificant and recoverable, and I spotted my mistakes in time to correct them, but it is still frustrating to be making these errors in the first place. It's time to get my head back in the game.

Posted in Work |
Tags: vibration