Best Of

I am on a train heading to LEuston. When I get there I will be tens of miles from my work laptop. Later tonight I will board the Caledonian Sleeper and tomorrow I will be in Edinburgh and hundreds of miles from my work laptop. My usual "ohshitohshit" work worry is being replaced by a more diffuse sense of unhappiness, revolving around the fact that if things go wrong I can't fix it. When I was a kid holidays were done when school broke up, but now work is a 24/7 experience and I can't relax because there is always work coming in. My clients are nice people but contact me at all hours requiring work to be done Right Now Tonight, so if they contact me and I'm On Holiday the work will just pile up until I return. I love my job but damn it is taking its toll. ☹️

That’s tough

You could literally tell your clients “step away for two weeks I’m on a family holiday”

I may be deluded but a lot of people respect that?

Yes...and no. Let me explain.

My present employers are an unnamed research and study organisation. They subcontracted their stats out but were being charged thru the nose. In an attempt to get one on the cheap they advertised for a statto who could demonstrate flexibility. Cue me. I'm held as an ad-hoc resource: the work isn't assigned to me via my line management but passed to me by the higher staff as a lure to attract work - "look, we have an in-house statistician who can answer your questions" - and it usually works. But the price of being a free-floating resource is that you can't say no. Some of them are high up (to the extent I have to Google their titles to see which one they use) and their time is *very* precious and you never tell them no. In fairness to them these are extraordinarily accomplished individuals and they have a very exact understanding of the value of time, so it's understandable, especially when the budgets are in the millions, the funding deadlines are tight, and I'm the only statto on staff.

Sometimes it's a pleasure. One of my clients is an expert in her field and has just given birth, so convos take place late at night when feeding the sprog. You can't expect somebody in that position to keep office hours. Sometimes it's a chore: one of my clients gives you five days of work and expects it done in five days, despite only paying me for two days a week and I have other clients to service. I normally end up working weekends to keep the balls in the air.

The stress occurs when the numbers have to be produced fast, or there are lots of them. A study document with fifteen tables, each with several columns and SD/IQR/% will require hundreds of numbers and each one has to be right. It's not a question of getting the computer to do it, since I design the study, write the codes, and write the reports, and if it fucks up there's a big red arrow pointing at my head, especially if somebody might die if I fuck up. So you double check like crazy.

The fun occurs in the learning. I can design a stepped-wedge study and write the code for it. Four years ago I didn't know what a stepped-wedge design was. Technically I am now a subject-matter expert in some of the obscurer conditions. I now have R, SAS and Stata on my CV which is the trifecta for a statto, provided you ignore the Python jobs which I am very pleased to do. So I have no regrets except that I wish I'd had this job twenty years ago...☹️

So burt Bacharach and Hal David got it completely wrong in their song “What the world needs now”

It should actually go like THIS

“What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love
No not just for some, but for everyone

“Lord, we don't need another mountain
There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb
There are oceans and rivers enough to cross
Enough to last 'til the end of time

What the world needs now is love, sweet love - BUT ALSO LAKES. WE NEED MORE LAKES”

That’s not only a much superior lyric in terms of rhythm and scansion, it also underlines the pro-lake message we need to send out

My wife was once songwriting in Santa Monica with John Bettis who wrote for The Carpenters (including "Goodbye To Love," "Yesterday Once More," "Only Yesterday," and "Top Of The World"). They were trying something out on the piano, when there was a knock on the door. "Don't answer it...." says Bettis. "It will be Burt..." Turns out Burt Bacharach lived above him - and would earwig on songwriting sessions. He'd come down if he heard something he liked - and try to muscle in! Wifey of course wanted to meet Burt, persuaded Bettis to let him in. And, as predicted, he then spent an age trying to get in on the act of the song they were writing.

Thought you might like that one!