Work and Pregnancy

When I was in college, everybody in my entourage told me that I was leading my life into a man's world. More so when I continued with chemistry, my mom particularly, already predicted that I'll have a lung cancer or other complications and will die at an early age. No, she's no Nostradamus, just a trying-hard-mom trying to dissuade her daughter from an unknown risk. I even remember contradicting my mom 'you wanted an engineer in the family, right?'...just to learn that this dream wasn't destined for me. Oh well...those arguments had no impact on me anyway, I nevertheless traced my path into this man's world full of complications!

My job consists mainly of projects at a global scale which requires a lot of time. A product which you buy in a supermarket doesn't arrive there alone in a second, obvious right? It normally passes through a long strategic pathway: marketing (to study market demand) - research - development - industrialisation - production - marketing (distribution). My world evolves around that blue-colored jobs.

Funny how it looks easy writing it that way, just a portion of a somewhat simple task. In fact, I do a part of development in collaboration with our R&D team which could extend from few months to infinity. After the development, we head straight on the industrialisation phase where we check its feasibility. A tough job. Profitability, industrial viability, and market acceptability are being studied here. My technical and economic prowess are being squeezed hard at this point. And would you believe that there are products which don't even see their light because of such and such? Whew! If everything is ok tho, the project will be deployed on site for mass production where my role is to implement the new process which includes defining the machine, the working parameters, the capacity, etc etc down to training the people so they could work on their own.

Interesting job, right? So what's the incidence on me being pregnant?

Chemicals - I wouldn't risk my baby's health, no matter what the cost. Bad thing is that, I work with chemicals. Not directly of course, but small doses at longer periods of exposure is just as dangerous. So I try to work 'from a distance', I prepare all the planning and let other people work for me (which is the case even at normal periods anyway), but I love analysing problems and final results myself - close to my subject! Anyway, I obliged myself to be a bit distant for awhile.. for the sake of my bébé.

Travels - it is clearly written in my job contract that 30% of my time will be spent on travels. That's part of my job. Techno transfers, especially when it involves chemicals, requires a minimum of hands-on implementation and training. If I were busy accumulating mileage last year, for a change, I never took the plane since the beginning of this year. Beginning to miss it!

By Project Basis - that would mean I should involve myself from Day 1 to D Day. So in consequence, no new projects for 2005, otherwise, I won't be able to follow the evolution of my new project. Unfortunately, all of my current projects are starting to reactivate now, few weeks before my maternity leave! I'm currently busy as a bee! Whew!

All that rolled into one reads: DANGEROUS FOR PREGNANT WOMEN!