Random, weird work thread. I’m working with another #NASA center that I haven’t typically worked with in my 13 years at the agency. And they’re more research focused, JSC is more human spaceflight focused. Ok cool - we need both.

But there’s this 1 guy...

And he’s brilliant. Don’t get me wrong. But he has this thing about asking questions at meetings. Like he will note attendance at meetings and as time goes on how many people have not asked questions.

I have never encountered this before.

Well one day, as I’m 2 whole months in on this new job, never seen my new office or met 99% of my new co-workers face to face and we think that we may need to take my Mother-In-Law to the hospital because she has really bad Covid, he calls me one on one.

To discuss meeting question statistics.

And I’m like...is this real life?

So I’m not really in the mood for this convo, I’m more concerned about my husband’s mother and my husband, because he just lost his father last year and this dude is taking score on meeting questions.

And he did not like my answers to his weird meeting question questions because he specifically called me out at a recent meeting.

“Holly, do YOU have any questions?” IN FRONT OF EVERYONE.

And I’m like wtf is up with this dude and questions, right? It’s so weird.

So we had a big meeting recently, a design review, and his center is very focused on their one widget but at the design review I thought more about the big picture and other systems and I asked a question.

And.

He got an action item. And I kinda felt bad.

So now I’ve decided that we are coming at this from different perspectives and that’s ok.

I will be asking about transducers and sensors and redundancy and failure scenarios and he will want to know about other things.

And that’s good!!

We need less groupthink!

Also, getting called out like that made me a bit paranoid, so I had a call with a manager and I asked if there was work that I needed to be doing that I wasn’t.

He said I was doing great given the circumstances. So next time I will just thank question guy for asking