quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
Don't you guys and girls think Mary Anna should go ahead and take up with a younger guy? It appears that too many the older ones are threatened by a female engineer/author.

My mother's sister-in-law did after becoming a widow. They have been together for many years.

I think she's been trying but they've all been jerks!

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up...

On reading my posts on my education and career, it occurs to me that I wouldn't want all the gender-related musings to be taken as man-hating, or as a generally resentful attitude toward half the human population. I did mention that the chemical engineering faculty were more than receptive to women students. In general, so were our classmates There was the occasional Neanderthal, but that's surely true in female-dominated departments as well. The surly professors and students in those departments either just persecute their male students, or they choose students to torture on other bases.

In my worklife, too, I was usually welcomed as a female. I did see male scientists badly mistreat our support staff, who were largely female, and I too often found myself going to bat for them in the face of mistreatment by people who were just looking for someone vulnerable to kick around. But those people would have been looking for someone to abuse in a single-gender situation, too.

Gender issues only touched my own career on rare occasions. One can't complain too loudly when one was a vice-president and a director at the age of 30. If I'd stayed at the consulting firm, I would have been the obvious choice to replace the president when he retired last year. A couple of people suggested I apply for the job despite the 13-year lapse in employment. Still, the behavior of random Neanderthals does get on a girl's nerves, sometimes.

quote:

Originally posted by Mary Anna:
On reading my posts on my education and career, it occurs to me that I wouldn't want all the gender-related musings to be taken as man-hating, or as a generally resentful attitude toward half the human population.

Are you kidding me? I didn't take your answers that way at all.

Not to pat myself on the back or anything but these are real questions. You gave me real answers. I would expect nothing less from you.

Thank you.

I'm getting Chef's recipe for caramel bonbon fillings tonight

Oh, joy!!!!!!

So how did you become published as a writer?

It must be a real thrill to see actual books that have your name on them!

I think that's awesome!

Your educational and career achievements are very impressive in general. Wow.

I haven't had a chance to read your books but I can't wait!

quote:

Try to imagine a man taking up...oh, I don't know...needlepoint, because he wanted to share an interest with the woman in his life.

Before we got married, I asked Mrs. Markb to show me how to knit (she must have been working on something at the time). I learned how to knit-one-purl-one and ended up with a 2x3" rectangle of blue yarn.

quote:

It appears that too many the older ones are threatened by a female engineer/author.

If true, that's a shame. Both online and in person, Mary Anna comes across as a personable, warm, interesting, funny, intelligent, and clever woman. These traits should be most welcomed, not feared. Sheesh.

And here's my request for Mary Anna: Please describe your experience performing the Raindrop Prelude on the Grand Spinet.

You mentioned rejection notices. Are there any unpublished works that you'd like to share or tell us about?

What engineering projects gave you the most satisfaction?

What's the scariest facility you've been in? (no names necessary - just a general description. I've always been a little nervous around chemical plants. I remember a pipe rupture in a chlor-alkali plant that sprayed sodium hydroxide all over an area I had been in about a half hour earlier and a nitric acid reactor that went exothermic and blew the bottom nozzles out, launching the vessel like a rocket right out of the plant and over the adjacent hill. Somehow, the visible hazards in steel mills are more palatable to me because I feel I can avoid most of them. What is going on inside closed pipes and vessels is more of a mystery.)

Are you working on anything particular in your piano repertoire at the moment?

Big Al

Hi Mary Anna...

I've been watching this thread, but so far have pretty much resisted getting involved (I think I had more than enough to say last month...) but I noticed you said something like "I totally suck at electricity" (or somesuch...)

I think I had that class myself back in the day when I was going through engineering school myself. I eventually came to the conclusion that EE's give everything a new name (i.e, what everyone else calls "vectors" they gotta call "phasers") just to confuse the great unwashed. (Every time I deal with an EE in my career, it just strengthens my opinion... for example, what the rest of the civilized world calls a "streetlight", EE's call a "luminaire"... for no good reason (although, now that I think of it, what the rest of the world calls an "I" beam, we call a "W-Section"... so maybe it's not confined to the weird and wonderful world of EE.)

As for gender issues, when I went through IWannaBeAnEngineer school, I was acquainted with a very attractive young lady (not THAT acquainted, sad to say...) who not only was drop-dead cute, blonde and a sorority member (and a person, who when you first saw her you would think that she drew 32" of mercury between her ears). Not so... she was a straight A student in Civil Engineering (and the Undergraduate advisor was her father's PhD advisor when he went through the program some years earlier...).

So, cute and blonde do not always equate to dumb...

Cool questions, y'all. I'm doing research in St. Augustine and this atmosheric b&b has no wireless Internet. I need to type with both hands to answer you properly, which ain't gonna happen on this phone. So I'll answer when I get home tomorrow. Try to carry on without me...

I'm back from St. Augustine and can now focus on your fascinating queries...

quote:

Originally posted by Daniel:
So how did you become published as a writer?

It must be a real thrill to see actual books that have your name on them!

Well, everybody thinks they'll toss off a story, send it in, and world fame will ensue. It rarely works that way, and certainly not for me. I first got serious about writing in grad school, because my right brain cannot survive on a constant diet of numbers, equations, and greek letters. I audited a class on writing short stories, got an A+ from the National-Book-Award-nominated instructor, then spent my twenties writing stories that were rejected.

I also wrote poetry during this time. I won a few minor awards and sold a few poems to third-rate journals. You people might be interested to know that most of the success I had with poetry was with haiku. But I also sold some free verse and won an award for a poem in sapphic meter, which is really hard to write.

I took a correspondence course in novel-writing while I was pregnant with Muffin and, a couple of years later, finally finished my first book. It got me a hotshot Manhattan agent and a lot of encouraging rejections, but no sale. That hotshot agent said, "If you got this close with that book, you should write another one." So I wrote ARTIFACTS, which also got a lot of attention with the big Manhattan firms, but no sale. Poisoned Pen Press is the largest independent mystery publisher in the country, so they were the first non-New-York firm we tried. They took it, as well as all my subsequent books.

Is it a thrill? Well, the fifth one landed on my doorstep in July, and I found that the "new book" smell is just as intoxicating as it was back in 2003 when ARTIFACTS came out.

quote:

Originally posted by markb:
Before we got married, I asked Mrs. Markb to show me how to knit (she must have been working on something at the time). I learned how to knit-one-purl-one and ended up with a 2x3" rectangle of blue yarn.

I love the guys on this board. I should have known one or more of you would have learned some female-associated hobby, either to share an interest with the woman in your life or simply because you were interested and you just weren't too concerned about gender stuff. And I do know we have at least one man here who is serious about knitting.

I just haven't stumbled across anybody quite like you guys yet. Your wives and partners are very lucky people indeed.

quote:

And here's my request for Mary Anna: Please describe your experience performing the Raindrop Prelude on the Grand Spinet.

With pleasure! I have never in my life encountered an instrument quite like the Grand Spinet. It sings. It growls. It has a yummy bass and a bell-like treble. The drops in the Raindrop Prelude have never sounded so rainy as they did on that luminous occasion when I was allowed to touch the Grandest of instruments. I am ever so grateful that Dr. markb trusted me not to detract too badly from its perfection.

quote:

Originally posted by big al:
You mentioned rejection notices. Are there any unpublished works that you'd like to share or tell us about?

What engineering projects gave you the most satisfaction?

Rejections? My first novel--the one that got me the agent--is still sitting on my shelf. I'm seriously thinking about releasing it myself in ebook form. At best, it might sell a few thousand copies to people who are interested in it because they already like my published work, but it might not be a bad business decision, since there would be no production costs and the income would be mine, mine, mine. I plan to check into this in my copious spare time--realistically, when I finish the current work-in-progress.

The engineering projects that gave me the most satisfaction?. Hmmm...I felt like I did my best work on multi-stage contamination assessment projects. I'd be sent out to assess the potential for contamination at a manufacturing plant. Based on that potential, I'd design and estimate costs for a testing plan, send out a crew, review the lab results, scope out any followup testing, hold the nervous client's hand, write the report, and start the ball rolling for any recommended remediation. Since I don't like to do the same thing all the time, I loved these projects, particularly the ones with weird contaminants or strange-shaped contaminant plumes or--even better!--multiple contaminant plumes.

If I had to pick one project, it would be county-wide petroleum remediation project I was managing until Muffin was born. The work was similar to that described above, but the contaminants were plain-Jane gasoline and diesel. I liked it because I wrote the proposal that won the job, and it was a big job for us. And I was just the assistant project manager, but the manager just dumped it on me and I got to do everything. I was drunk with power.

This is getting long. I'll answer your other questions in my next post, so hang tight.

quote:

Originally posted by big al:

What's the scariest facility you've been in?

Big Al

Scariest site? I did an initial survey at a plant that cleaned out used 55-gallon drums, relined them, then shipped them out for reuse. Like most of these projects, it sounded so innocuous. Doesn't it?

Well, the first part of the tour took me through your basic small chemical-related plant that was just a little sloppy, because it was Louisiana and they're not real into environmental niceties. Some of the drums had held some pretty hideous stuff, so I should have seen what was coming, but I was oblivious...until we got to the basement, and I found out how they got the polymer linings out of drums that had held such awful things.

Each drum was affixed to a mechanism that rocked it to-and-fro. An appropriate mixture of solvents and acids and caustics and detergents was poured in, based on what the drum had held. Oh, heck. That's not true. I think they just slopped in whatever they had handy, if they thought it would get the sludge out of these things. Then they dropped a big heavy chain in each one, so that the rocking action would bump it around in the drum and remove the polymer lining by friction.

And where did the sludge/polymer/solvent/acid/caustic/detergent mixture go afterward? Hold that terrifying thought. We'll get to that in a minute.

First, picture the scene in the basement--a warehouse-sized room filled with drums rocking to-and-fro, generating an unholy amount of noise as the chains crash back-and-forth. There are puddles of God-knows-what on the floor. It's probably stuff that sloshed out of the drums, but I don't know that for sure. Because some of the solvents are acid and some of the drum contents contain water, the air is thick with smoky-looking fumes. I remember thinking that if four musicians were perched on some of those drums, it would be the perfect setting for a rock video.

I pasted a smile on my face and followed my client through the melee', thinking, "You have no idea what I'm going to have to put in this report, but you're really going to hate it."

Once we escaped safely from the drum-cleaning hellhole, we moved on to a warehouse. Remember my question about where they put the waste generated in the drum-cleaning hellhole? Well, it went into drums and then into this warehouse. Many, many drums...some of them leaking God-knows-what. When we opened the door to the warehouse, I was met face-to-face by a man in moon-suit-level personal protection gear.

Was I wearing a moonsuit? Heck, no. I was wearing a business suit and a smile. My client mumbled something about how they'd been asked by the state to clean up that warehouse and inside the moonsuit was one of the consultants hired for that job.

I did not go into the warehouse. I just noted what I'd heard and seen in my notes and moved on. I compiled a detailed assessment report, but we were not hired to do the follow-on testing and remediation. I devoutly hope that somebody eventually did that work.