What was a typical day like here?

Well a lot of phone calls, that's one thing the scientists got to confront here. If you're on committee, [and] I was on several committees, writing standards for ASTM, or American National Standards Institute, or forest products industry and interact with lots of people. You get a lot of committees and you publish papers. People start to look at some of your papers [and] they [have] questions. [You might receive] twenty, thirty calls a day [and] that's time consuming in itself. But, well I guess typically you come in and look at your agenda, see what you got due today [and] work around the phone calls and the meetings. There was a lot of meetings. A typical day might be---probably spent half your time in the office. If you [have] got testing going on you go down to the laboratory, set up the test, conduct the test, and look at the results. If you are destructively testing things you got to look at how they broke, or where they broke, and how, things like that. But designing the tests is another thing that can be a big job. I got involved in wall racking tests because I was involved in a lot of wind studies, [e.g.] resistance to hurricanes and cyclones. The wind forces are resisted by the walls that are parallel to the wind direction, racking walls, and there are ASTM standards [tests]. The walls resist the racking either by a mechanical brace, which they call let-in corner brace or the sheathing material that goes on it. The force is transferred between the wood frame and the sheet materials through the fasteners, which would be the nails, for example. So I had a lot of work. First of all [I investigated] the strength of individual nails and [looked] at the nail patterns and see how the nails [transferred] force. If you got 75 nails in [the wall, force is] not divided [equally]. Certain nails, depending on their location, get far more stress than the others. So it's an analytical process.