Ramblings of one stressed woman

I am so stressed that my new colleague saw me and exclaimed "This is one stressed woman!!" and my supervisor had to agree and said "I've never seen her truly relaxed before" and then I realised that other than my non-college friends who have seen me laughed or relaxed outside uni, it is not difficult for people who have only seen me in college to have the impression that I'm one uptight soul. Well yeah, I admit I'm one 1000% bloody stressed woman right now but it hasn't always been like this. I don't smile or laugh when I'm working seriously and born with a stern face, it's no surprise that I look fierce or stressed when I work. And I only see my supervisors when I run into problems or when we have our 4-5 hour group meetings every 1-2 months. Who wouldn't look stressed?

Maybe I'm upset that people can see that I'm stressed because I AM STRESSED. I'm stretched so thin and feel so hopelessly exhausted that I had to call MX for help on Monday. So, instead of heading back to the office after today's conference meeting, I spent two hours window shopping along Knightsbridge. It was jolly good. OK, ok, I did some shopping therapy as well, to make myself feel better but it's not some pair of expansive shoes this time, just a hand embroidered shawl from Tie Rack.

Actually, despite having to come back to office to make up for lost time tonight, I did enjoy today's conference very much, because all the speakers addressed something that I can relate to and I learnt something useful and important from each one of them. Other than the regular academics who talked about their work, we had representatives from Airbus and F1 who addressed the issues and challenges they faced with using composite materials and adhesive bonding as well. Their talks were informative and enlightening and I can go on and on about was presented at the conference here but I think this is the most important message I brought away with me today:

We fear not the strength, but the weaknesses of the materials employed.

Personally I fear the use of polymeric composites by people who only see the benefits of the material but are ignorant to their vulnerabilities. In fact, we all are. There is not one conclusive study that guarantees the long term durability of these materials and we are already employing them in critical primary structural applications. Is it a risk worth taking? Application without full appreciation and understanding of the material behaviour which by the way is unique to every composite system, is not only a highly dangerous activity but also an irresponsible one because it's failure will put millions of lives at risk. I just feel that the knowledge we have is insufficient for producing good system designs and the engineer in me just cannot trust my life on some guesswork regardless of how brilliant or experienced the designing team is. Furthermore, we are not talking about small one-off prototypes. We are talking about ambitious commercial products which themselves are prototypes and objects of experimental studies-in-process as it transport humans around the globe. Can we afford to trust a material that we know so little of, that is still being studied and characterised by labs worldwide, to last the 35-40 years like the good old, albeit heavy metal birds? I certainly do not wish to be a guinea pig on a commercial experiment.