Mission Failure

There are many topics on my backlog to blog about: fun space things I’ve seen, new space things I’ve accomplished, my plans for the future. But what’s on my mind today is a matter of heart: mistakes, scapegoating, and team discord.

Bullying, which causes psychological harm to children everywhere, also affects adults in the workplace. I was victim to a workplace bully in graduate school who harmed my perception of myself, slowed my research progress, and exasperated my sense of impostor syndrome in the laboratory that took me years to overcome.

Preparing for my first ZeroG Corporation parabolic microgravity flight in grad school was a joyful, if exhausting experience. Finally, I would be able to float in free-fall – just as astronauts do – even if for only 30 seconds at a time. And I would be accomplishing real science as I soared, science I needed for my PhD. I wanted to have a blast, but I also wanted the experiment to be a success.

Which makes the outcome of that experience all the more frustrating.

Each team member was trained to handle a specific role during the flight. We had four team members and four roles. All four tasks needed to be accomplished during each microgravity-creating parabola in order to make the experiment a success. We had four experiment boxes to run the experiment four times, but only one laptop and camera setup.

My task was to press a button at the right time to release an impactor (a marble) to shoot at a very slow speed into a container of sand (fake Moon or Mars dirt/regolith simulant). But I couldn’t do my job alone; I relied on another team member with a better viewing angle to tell me when to fire the trigger. Our jobs depended on each other. We all needed to work together.

The first two tries were a flop. The trigger didn’t fire. Something must have been loose in the wiring. The third try worked! But my team member got too excited and told me to press the trigger too early. We weren’t having the best luck with scientific research.

At this point, we were losing team members. Two of the team had tapped out by then, victim of the Vomit Comet. We prepared for that eventuality, although admittedly not well. Each member of the team had spent a few minutes in the lab learning all the other team member’s tasks in case we needed to take over for a sick teammate. Had we thought a bit more ahead of time, we would have realized a few minutes of training would not cut it in a high-pressure quick-paced floating environment where it was hard enough to control limbs, let alone the experiment. But at the time, I had no choice. I took over the camera operation as well as my triggering duties and hoped for the best.

The best is not what happened. I don’t know how, but instead of recording 30 seconds of data on our forth and final experiment attempt, the video recorded a fraction of a second that looped for 30 seconds. I had never seen that happen before and had no idea the software even had that feature. I wasn’t sure if it was something I had done wrong, something the previous camera operator had done wrong, or just a very odd glitch in the camera software. But I was the one who pressed the camera buttons, so I accepted blame.

Up until this point, my workplace bully (the lab manager) had no legitimate complaints against me. She was envious of my educational success beyond her own, frustrated she had no authority over me, and infuriated that she couldn’t get under my skin, at least not yet. But the camera failure gave her the perfect opportunity and she jumped on it. Despite the fact that three of the four experiments failed for other reasons and the forth failure may or may not have my fault, I became the scapegoat for the whole mission failure.

With my own admission of possible guilt and no useful data to show for the ZeroG flight, she successfully turned half the lab against me, impressionable undergraduates who depended on her opinion for a job and who she also bullied to a lesser degree. The lab was a dysfunctional mess and a toxic work environment. I accepted increased isolation in the lab for my own mental health, trying my best to avoid contact with her.

My biggest failing was to internalize her lies about me. I began to see my labwork and my aptitude as a scientist in a more negative light, wondering if I really was a failure. This doubt hindered my success for years.

My bully petitioned hard to prevent me from flying during our next parabolic flight opportunity, this time with NASA in Houston. But with multiple flights over multiple days, we needed a larger team of flyers. I did fly for one of those parabolic flights. This time, it was me who got sick halfway through the flight and had to pass off my job tasks to another team member. And this time around, despite the multiple flights, our experiment failed for other reasons. I could not be blamed.

Despite the research failures, the team disharmony, and the eventual vomiting, I did have a blast during those parabolic flights. They remain one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. I would do it again in a heartbeat if given the opportunity.

Floating around in microgravity - Nov. 2011

When I read about today’s Rocket Lab test flight failure because someone on the ground forgot to tick a box in ground control software, I feel for that person. The weight of failure on his/her shoulders must be very heavy right now. It is my deepest hope that whoever was responsible for the software mistake which doomed the Rocket Lab launch feels supported by his/her team, not isolated or ostracized.

Poor coworkers might scapegoat an employee who makes a mistake. But in reality, mistakes like that don’t happen in isolation. A unified, well-working team would work together during preparation to ensure easy mistakes don’t happen, but when they do, they would band together to accept fault as a group and seek solutions for the future. Mission success depends on the efforts of all, working together for a common purpose, holding each other up, working past failures, and celebrating successes. Mission success depends on everyone.

Workplace Bullying in the Professional World of Space Sciences

Bullying is commonplace, almost expected sometime in childhood. Numerous anti-bullying awareness initiatives exist in schools and communities. But what about bullying in adulthood? Do we ever expect to experience a bully in the workplace, in our professional lives?

The most common stereotype is the bullying boss. Unfortunately, this was my first experience with a workplace bully. It began with good intentions. She saw me as an apprentice. I was grateful for her interest in me and the opportunities she gave me. We had a good first couple of years.

The trouble began when my professional interests began to diverge from hers. She began to get more controlling about what I did with my time. I remember her getting upset with me when I attended a guest lecture because it wasn't about our specific subfield of physics. She wanted me to quit all of my extracurriculars and hobbies. She wanted to see me at work in the evenings and on weekends. Who was she to tell me what I could do with my spare time? Grad students are only paid for 20 hours per week, so technically speaking, I was already working tons of unpaid overtime.

She had my future planned out for me. She wanted me to start working on a new project that wasn't part of my doctoral research plan and wasn't directly applicable to my dissertation. I had my own funding at that point, a NASA GSRP fellowship, with a set research plan. Had I been interested in the new project, I would have jumped on the opportunity, but I simply wasn't interested. Only later did I realize that she was trying to get me to work on her new pet project at no cost to her.

She decided that after I graduated, she was going to send me to her colleague's university in Europe to work as a post-doc. Some graduate students would be thrilled to know that they already had a post-doc opportunity lined up for them. I was not. I had no interest in doing a post-doc in that field of study and moving to Europe. I felt that she was trying to dictate my life even after I was no longer her employee.

Once she realized that I had a mind of my own, she gave me the “it's my way or the highway” ultimatum. I was an emotional mess. I felt that she had her thumb pressed down on me and was pressing harder and harder. I felt trapped. When I finally decided to take “the highway,” I felt free! I later learned that she slandered me to my fellowship program, but that did little damage.

The next workplace bully I encountered was a colleague, a peer. She and I were at the same level and worked together in the same lab, but we had different roles and different students who we were supervising. She was hired to take some responsibilities off my plate so I could focus on other things.

She hated that she wasn't my supervisor. She wanted to be in charge of the whole lab. It drove her nuts that we were equal. It bothered her even more that I wasn't intimidated by her. She tried many methods of intimidation to try to “win” what she saw was a battle against me. What bothered her the most was that she never won. I always held firm and refused to compromise my integrity.

She yelled at me and insulted me to the point where, instead of responding, I had to drop whatever I was doing and leave the room (mostly so she didn't see me cry). She spread lies about me to the other students and told me lies about what the other students allegedly said about me. She turned one of my students against me, but he got egg on his face when he realized that he made a mistake with our experiment, not me. She made the workplace a toxic environment.

My supervisor at the time is a wonderful, supportive man, but he's not a fan of confrontation. He sat us down for a meeting together and tried to get us to reconcile, but by that point, extensive damage had already been done. I was at the point of creating documentation to report my work bully to the university's human resources department when I learned the happy news that she was leaving. Something switched in her mind at that point, because she was actually a decent human being to me at the very end. Go figure.

My third workplace bully was an administrative assistant, an older lady. She was the admin assistant to the big boss of the company. Because she held this role, she thought herself superior to all, as if she was the actual assistant big boss.

We rarely worked together. Once I needed her assistance to get some signatures from the big boss for a project. Another admin assistant and I approached her on a Friday early afternoon for her help. All she had to do was give the papers to her boss to have him sign them, then hand them back to us, a five minute job. She decided that she didn't like how we had printed the papers, so she reprinted them to her liking, which took her approximately half an hour.

Little did I know until months later that this bully held a grudge against me because I asked her to (gasp!) do her job on a Friday. She waited until I was on travel attending a conference to ask me a question via email on an afternoon, a non-urgent question that I did not know the answer to because it wasn't my job to know. When I didn't answer her first thing the next morning, she wrote back to me CCing my boss and the big boss demanding to know why I hadn't answered her.

Unfortunately, my boss at the time operated out of fear and thought that any negative confrontation with his employees reflected poorly on him. Before I had even gotten a chance to form a response to the email, my boss contacted me demanding that I apologize to the bully and do whatever she wanted, immediately. He took it a step further by concluding that because I hadn't answered her email immediately, I wasn't responsible with my time during conferences. I hadn't taken any action at this point, all of this mess was being done to me, and I felt like a hit-and-run car victim. Just as the bully had planned.

The bully continued to escalate the issue when I returned from travel. Things were said about me behind closed doors. I learned that she claimed that I dropped a project on her on a Friday afternoon and made her work late doing it, and I never apologized for it. My boss didn't care about the actual issue, he only cared about the conflict, so he insisted that I apologize to her. But I don't appease bullies. I knew that she wanted to, “put me in my place,” and demonstrate that she had power. I was not going to give her that satisfaction.

Finally, to appease my boss, I approached her and asked, “Do we have anything to talk about?” “No,” she responded. When my boss asked if I had talked to her, I could honestly answer yes. Thankfully, I never had to work with her again.

What do all of these bullies have in common? One: they're alpha females. I've noticed a tendency for strong females to become adversarial with other strong females who they see as competition. Two: they aren't used to people standing up to them. Three: they all rose to positions of authority in professional environments.

Bullies don't just exist on schoolyards or blue collar jobs. My biggest misconception was that all professionals act professionally in professional environments. This is not always the case. I've had to learn that, with this and everything else, I can only control my own actions. Others can act as they please, but my goal is to remain professional even in the face of the harshest workplace bully.