Oh What a Night

A migraine night last night - it was a long one. I had one of my classic 3 O'clock onset migraines and it persisted through the night. A Tylenol 3 this morning finally put it to bed (I hope, could be that the codeine just has masked it, and it will be back in an hour or so). Usually it's about 14hours, so I expected it to be gone during the night, but I was awake to hear my hourly watch chime for every beep from 3:03am onward. Could really use a few more hours of sleep.

But, hey, I dozed a bit after the Ty3, perhaps 7:30 to 8:00, and I'm even in the office for 9:00 this morning, with a sea of oceanographic research waiting for me. What will be in my inbox this morning? I'm hoping a reply from India on a query I made yesterday to some colleagues there. There's a chance they could collaborate on my understaffed er, mollusk research.

I should say something about my research just now. I have a couple of projects - neither is mine, in that they were going before I joined this company, but I've picked them up and ran with them. The first one is mollusk research, which I have to push, because the founder of the research bailed before I joined, and the remaining free staff have no skills to own, communicate and push on the topic. It has merits for sure, and should (in a perfect world) have about 8 people behind it, rather than one manager and an unfocussed researcher with only ancillary skills, and the odd student that flows through.

The other project is the shark project - it has a skilled researcher behind it and driving it, but he's rather communication averse, and tends toward isolationism as he pushes the work forward.

I really need to grow this group to have some reasonable impact, but there are political forces in Europe (one specific normally insignificant corner of Europe) where some sort of national culture of passive aggressive behaviour results in a bizarre combination of friendly to your face, cancel your program-behind-your-back. They also focus on the shiny surface of projects without tackling anything with any depth.

I've also notice that they all must subscribe to "Oceanographic Monthly" because I notice an uncanny ability to pick their projects from the table of contents. Any nifty new oceanographic gadget or trend, and they are working on it a month or two later, though never really 'getting' it.

Oh well, let them spin their webs and chase their tails.

I should point out that I'm really not much of an Oceanography fan, myself. I'm much more interested in say, cartography. But this gig pays well, and I can do a decent job of it, and lots of the skills overlap. But I'd really rather drop the mollusks and be making some decent high volume maps. I'm much more about consumer markets and things that people use hands on. The mollusk stuff is all hidden in a back room somewhere - er, under the ocean I mean. I'm much more interested in stuff that people interact with, and where a good understanding of that behaviour pays off well. I don't get that in the oceanography space.

Oh these decoy words I'll have to publish a legend some day. :)