I am trying to figure out what my role is going to be in all our Mars work now that a coworker who has previously done 90% of the work is scheduled to retire this summer. Gavin is going to take the lead role in it, which is probably as it should be, but I’m concerned that he might not have time to do everything and that a portion will fall to me. And I feel totally lost as to what the project is, where it’s going, and how exactly to do the work they need from me. I keep telling Gavin that I don’t know what’s going on, and he keeps asking me why, and I keep saying I don’t know. I think he’s getting frustrated with me. Actually, I know he is.
He keeps asking what I need to do to understand it, and I keep saying I don’t know. Because I really don’t know. But that’s not helping anything, and it’s frustrating to me to feel out-of-synch with the project and yet not really know how to put it into words or how to fix it. All I know is that I just feel totally clueless about the technical details and, as has been pointed out to me multiple times in the past couple weeks, let’s face it — I suck at technical details to begin with.
God, some days I really don’t think I was meant to be an engineer. What if I gutted it out through 6 years of school and 2 aerospace degrees and I’m just now finding out that in reality, I’m a bad engineer?? That technical matters aren’t my strong suit? I mean, I can’t remember the specifics of the work I did six months ago, much less the classes I took three years ago. Poof! The knowledge is gone. I know everyone thinks I’m doing fine work, but that doesn’t change the fact that half the time I feel like I’m an idiot and have no real contribution to make to the space program. Not only can I not come up with new ideas, I can’t even understand the old ones.
Somehow I’ve gotten to the point where instead of treating my lack of understanding as a challenge and committing to figuring it out, I just give up in frustration. And whine. I whine too much.
With the Mars stuff, I just feel like if it were all — all meaning the concept, the history, and the design process — just written down somewhere in a nice step-by-step order, that would be all I need. But of course such a document doesn’t exist.
