I'll be home for Christmas

Today is the day I have been bracing myself for all week. Today I am plunging myself into every expat's nightmare: the airport on the weekend before Christmas. I personally know at least five other -unrelated- people boarding a plane today and at an expected 1.2 million passengers pouring through Heathrow airport over the next week that is just the tip of the iceberg. I have chilling visions of queues meandering all the way from Gatwick to Croydon and anticipate a long, long day.

Last year I got stuck at Gatwick for 9 hours after my flight was cancelled due to fog. Of those nine hours I spent about 4 queuing with nothing to eat or drink and no way to get out and buy some without losing my spot in the queue. I will not let that happen to me this year. My carry-on luggage is stuffed with high-energy snacks and water. Things aren't looking all that promising this year either. Yesterday more flights were cancelled, again courtesy of the English mists. On top of that airport staff has been threatening to go on strike over the Christmas period. That threat has now been pushed back until two days after my return to the Big Smoke but with people cruel enough to entertain the thought of striking over Christmas, you just never know.

Why o why do we submit ourselves to this annual horror? I am actually not that keen on Christmas at all and wouldn't be too put out by just pretending it isn't there. My mum would strangle me though, I fear, if I didn't make the effort. Like most families we'll sit through the obligatory Christmas dinner and stuff ourselves. It's the season to be jelly. So here I am, with my bags packed and a heart filled with dread at the day ahead of me, ready to cross the puddle.

See you on the other side!

Workaholic

My first flatmate in London was a real workaholic. We didn't share a house for very long but in those few weeks I lived there I hardly ever saw him. He would come home from the office really late and lived on take-out meals and cigarettes. It didn't seem a very healthy way to live. It is the way a lot of people in London live though. This city is known for the long hours people work. Before I came here, I was never even aware of the existence of the European Working Time Directive, which forbids employers from making their employees work more than 48 hours a week. That is of course, unless you sign an 'opt-out', something which many large companies here enforce.

I work at the university and academia is not generally a place where people are being worked to death. It is not that PhD students don't work hard. Often times they work really hard but it mostly is on a semi-voluntary basis, as in: sooner or later that thesis needs to be finished. I have worked the occasional weekend or evening in those days as well, but it certainly was not the rule. Our group now though is a bit of a chimera of academia and business. The work we do is definitely research based but many of our projects are commissioned and that means we have to work to the client's deadlines. This time of year is the worst. Everybody is trying to get things finished 'before the holidays'. I had two projects with major deadlines on it this week. One of them in particular has kept me working weekends and evenings. I haven't slept properly in days. My eyes are bloodshot and my muscles tight like the strings on a violin.

But the work is done! I managed to deliver to my deadlines, in part because London is 5 hours ahead of Washington where our client is based. I am pleased to have managed but am exhausted to my very core. I have now snuggled up on the sofa under the duvet, for the first time in days doing something other than work on my laptop. As soon as I type the last sentence I will go brush my teeth and surrender to Morpheus' sweet embrace.

Zzzzzz.....

The ivory tower

Most of my working life I have had the same job title: researcher. Research to most people conjures up images of people in scruffy white labcoats or stuffy book-filled attics. And these cliche images exist for a reason. For five years I worked in a lab, fiddling with pipets and coloured solutions, although in all fairness I only ever wore a labcoat to keep me from shivering in the 'cold room'. My work was far divorced from a tangible reality. The lab was a playground where we did not often consider the outside world.

My job title may still be the same but my new job has hurled me out of the confines of the ivory tower and smack-bang into the real world. What a brave new world it is! It is a world of meetings, focus groups and consultation events. I have spent the last two days in hospitals talking to people on the receiving end of all that we brew up in our scientific pressure cooker: the patients. Sat on hospital beds talking to patients with a dozen tubes running in and out of their bodies. Listened to tales of woe from people who suffered medical errors or hospital bugs.

It is inspiring and illuminating to deal with the people on the ground. In the ivory tower you can loose sight of the purpose of what you are doing. Words become increasingly complex and bogged down in jargon. When you go back to the patient you find you no longer speak the same language. We even need to have our documents and questions 'Plain English-ed' before we can take them out. In chemistry the jargon is so outlandish that you don't expect people outside of the field to understand phrases like isotope labeled medium or beta-mercaptoethanol. In management and social studies it is more subtle. That makes the risks only bigger though. You think you talk like a normal person and instead you find you may as well have been talking Greek, which in some cases might even have been more helpful.

Welcome to the real world!