This is Day 1 of retirement for me (first Monday not going to work). There are lots of thoughts, so I may make multiple posts....
... AND, I really want this blog to be a forward looking thing... not wallowing in the past, BUT this will be one exception.
Vicky and I were driving up the NJ Turnpike yesterday, passing the time discussing many aspects of this retirement thing, when she suddenly asked "Over your whole career, what do you regret the most?"
Initially I started to say that I don't really have any, but then the thought came... yea, there is one.
It's funny in a weird sort of way in that my biggest career regret is also attached to my proudest accomplishment.
Did I tell you that I have a US Patent? I do. It's even an analytical chemistry patent (which is hard to do as an employee of a "normal" company - meaning a company NOT producing products for analytical chemistry, but merely using them).
It comes from the middle of my career, around 2007. I was working for a huge multinational flavor and fragrance conglomerate at the time, where I was the head of their main R&D Chromatography Lab. Without going into proprietary detail, one thing that flavor and fragrance companies do is research into how to engineer a flavor or a fragrance (really just a mixture of oils) to do a certain task.
One example of this is the BBQ flavor on your potato chips. If they just put the flavor oil on the chips they would have soggy chips. By using flavor engineering and spray drying the flavor with starch, you end up with that BBQ flavored power that nicely sticks to the chips (and your fingers). On the fragrance side, a company might want their fragrance in a fabric softner to stick better to the fabric so the piece of clothing would smell fresh a few hours after the laundry process - perhaps as the clothing was being put away at the end of a long day.
My boss at the time had termed this "long lastingness" and was determined to help improve this property. A neat part of that job was my freedom to dream up ways to measure this. This involved coming up with all sorts of ways to capture fragrances and coax them into a GC system for measurement.
One day I walked into her office and she threw a white towel at me and said "Smell this!". I took a sniff and said it smelled like a neutral towel - no real fragrance. (Side Note, this exchange is not as weird as it sounds... we were in a fragrance company, after all.) She then told me to scrunch it up for a few moments and then take another whiff, which I did, and then I smelled one of our "Fresh Air" fragrances. My eyes went wide when she told me the towel was washed two weeks ago!
That was the start of the "Capsule Project" for me.
What ensued was multiple years of intense and interesting analytical effort... thousands upon thousands upon thousands of analyses over many years, and the above patent is for an analytical procedure I invented with a couple of colleagues to crack the problem of "how do you measure fragrance on clothing when the fragrance is sealed in microcapsules?"
And this leads to the "Biggest Regret" part.
Microcapsules are microdrops of fragrance wrapped in a hard cross-linked plastic shell. The regret hit me during a big celebration we held a couple of years into the project... we were celebrating the completion of a large capsule making unit. I had just visited the plant and just one of the two reactor vessels would fill my two-story living room. The announcement at the celebration is we would now have the capacity to create two batches of the microcapsules per vessel each day... and that another facility was being built in another of our plants in Asia.
Everyone was cheering and sipping the champaign the company brought in for the celebration... I wore a smile on my face, but inside I was devastated.
I'm not a staunch environmentalist, but at that time I was beginning to read about microplastic pollution - especially in the oceans - and here we were celebrating the fact that we could now manufacture TONS of plastic microcapsules that would get put into fabric softner, laid down on fabrics, removed in the next wash and rinsed down the drain to (eventually) the ocean. Yes the company had paid some consultants to do a study and the conclusion was that these would be caught by filters at sewage treatment plants, but that just means a side trip to a landfill first (before ending up in waterways). All this just so families could smell some fresh smells on their laundry for a longer period.
My regret comes down to what kind of world are we leaving for the future, and did we REALLY do our best to provide for them?
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