This is a piece about what it’s like to be diabetic when nothing is working.

“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something,” Wesley to Buttercup from the Princess Bride movie.  We all have those those when nothing seems to be going right, whatever we do doesn’t work and it just feels like a struggle.

When you have something like type 1 diabetes, anything that changes the playing field can literally be painful, if it causes high blood sugar, or a frightening game of catch-up if your blood sugar is low.

Most of the time, life ticks along simply enough.  There are a few moments when things aren’t quite smooth sailing, but mostly a simple correction straightens everything out.

Last year, Adam Brown shared the 42 factors that affect blood glucose.  When I wrote my book I grouped these into three main influencers: stress, ingestion and insulin.

Insulin generally speaking lowers blood sugar.  Although it isn’t quite that simple because a very small hypo may self-recover.  As my control tightened with the long distance bike riding that was really noticeable and it was really important to understand my basal rates and insulin on board (from boluses) before over treating with carbohydrates.  Over night, the body can self correct to such an extent that there can be a high although I’ve not observed that since I’ve been using pump therapy and been much more closely aligned to my basal needs compared to long acting insulin.  What do I mean by a very small hypo?  Well, if my blood sugar is above 3.8mmol/l but below 4mmol/l – indeed if we take the accuracy of the testing methods into consideration, I may not actually be hypo at all.

Insulin on board?  I take a bolus of insulin to cover the food I eat on top of my normal basal levels of insulin.  That insulin last for approx. 4 hours for me.  If I had 4 units 2 hours ago, I have used a couple of units worth and still have 2 units of insulin working in my body for a couple of hours or so – for me, that can lower my blood sugar by 5mmol/l so unless my food taken at that time is still being processed and absorbed, I may need 10g or so to ensure I am not hypo in two hours time and I would tend to do that with something like a mini-coke or very small glass of fruit juice.

Ingestion is food and drink.  This can do either, although the only thing I’ve found that lowers my blood sugar meaningfully is alcohol which is why no-one should drink on an empty stomach.  Food and drink is a highly complex subject and in this I am not including painkillers or other medication, otherwise it really does but very complicated very quickly.

Stress, for me, is everything else.  Your circadian rhythm shows the stress your body is under from your bodily functions and queues from the sun.  The way you get excited before your favourite food turns up, is a kind of stress.  The nervousness you feel before sitting an exam or driving test, is your mind asking your body for some help during a stressful time and in response, your body releases cortisone and adrenaline in response to a request from the hypothalamus or your body gearing up to fight the cold virus your nearest and dearest have given to you.

If you’re not diabetic, that response is not always useful, but you respond to the cortisone and adrenaline by dumping stores of glycogen from your liver and muscles and your pancreas ensures there is enough insulin to make use of that extra energy.

I don’t do that, I feel grotty, test my blood sugar and then treat the resulting high blood sugar.

Sounds like a plan

When fighting an infection, my body, like a non-diabetics, releases glucose stores ready to produce a fever.  Only that doesn’t happen because there’s nothing to make use of the energy.  The feedback loop then gets twisted and because my body is under stress and short of energy, it can release more cortisol and adrenaline, raising my blood sugar further.  Meanwhile, the infection is still there, now with a load of unaccounted food for it to feed off.

It’s a mess, this is a war zone, with no areas without conflict.  Except, I am trying to fight the good fight and dose up with insulin.

Which can alleviate the stress, which then causes a drop in levels of the stress hormones and I am then dealing with a massive hypo.

And that’s if my body is able to fight the well feed infection: bacteria and viruses are simple, when there is food, they multiply.

Somebody gave me a cold four weeks ago, when I find out who…  In the meantime, my control has gone out of the window.  I’m eking by, largely by fasting and watching it like a hawk, going from high to less high to low, but I am so knackered.  The nausea when I drop is the pits.

Medicine which soothe the symptoms are great and can lower my blood glucose but I end up in a “dipping cycle”, as they wear off, my blood sugar climbs, as they become effective, it drops.

It feels like I am running a marathon 24/7.

Of course, I am not externally showing any signs: the odd sniffle, sneeze and cough, but not obviously sick.

On with the game.  Enjoy yours 🙂

Oh, and a reminder to all those with a compromised immune system out there: get your flu shot this year, please.  Because however bad the cold is, flu is a killer for us.

I love proverbs and adages, for me they encapsulate our collected knowledge to some useful sound bites.  I love this one from Lao Tzu: The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.  It’s much older than that phrasing, as seen above, and for me it ties in with the idea you cannot judge a person’s actions until you walk a mile in their shoes.  Everyone’s journey is unique, at times it’s easier and at others, it is so much harder.

On Sunday 4th August 2019, at 5:32am my husband and I drove to Stratford and I worked out where I needed to be to participate in the Prudential Ride 100, a cycle journey around London and Surrey (not the easiest thing to do if you weren’t in the first “wave of riders”).

The 100 mile route

Of course, being type 1, my day didn’t start there.  I woke up a bit earlier than planned (4:35 instead of 4:50), knowing that my blood sugar was high even before I reached for my flash glucose reader.  Instead of following all the advice for carb loading before the start of the long ride, I was busily trying to drag my blood sugar down.  After 30 mins of trying, I gave up and inserted a second new cannula and packed a breakfast.

My ride in numbers

Experience had had us loading the car the night before, so armed with the consumables for the day, we headed south.  I had breakfast at 5:55 as we were approaching Colchester on the A12.

The approach I took to lower my blood glucose and ensure I could do the ride at 8:32am worked, and though I was a little high before I actually started riding the 100 miles, it was close enough with my programmed basal – basal rate 4 was the plan for that day.

Basically, normal basal up to 8am, then for an hour, up to 120% of what I normally have, then drop from 9am to 80%.  That would cope with the initial push, where I dump some of my glycogen stores from my muscles and then my blood sugar starts to naturally drop.

After that first hour, I set a timer on my fitbit and every 45 minutes had a torq gel: 28.5g of available, easily digested glucose.

Torq gels

After the really steep hills, I had one at the top too and reset the timer.  I’d worked out, for my estimated 8 hour ride, 10 should be plenty, but I ended up carrying 12 just in case.  That was not the right number as we’ll see later.

As can be seen from my FreeStyle Libre graph, you can see when those gels were taken, every little rise in blood sugar.  A rise then a dip, a rise…   You can see there are some gaps in the graph: I love the Libre but it does have difficulties when my blood sugar is changing very rapidly.

What my phone caught

The first four hours dropped by, nice and easy even though I was setting a good pace.  Then my phone’s battery died.  Thankfully, I had my Libre’s reader with me, but my husband had headed off to catch up with some friends as 8+ hours is a long time to kill.  Basically, this was noise, we were meeting up at the JDRF picnic at the end of the ride, so everything was going to be fine!

In 3hours 55minutes of moving time, I had covered 51.3miles: an average of 13.1mph, which was well within my reach.  I’d peaked going down hill at 28.9mph and even on the steep hills where many were getting off their bikes to walk, I was keeping on the bike and dropping down to 4mph.  My phone died at 13.10 and I completed the ride at 17:10, so I kept that pace up even though it felt like it was mostly up hill at that point ?.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

Of course, that doesn’t speak about how it felt.  100miles is a long way and nobody in their right mind should do it without some prep – as a type 1, that preparation must include blood sugar management.

It was interesting how many people struggled with energy management and struggled towards the end.  They were probably much fitter than me and had lighter bikes (my push bike weighs in at 30kg when I took the rear rack off).

I had my gel packs (342g of CHO) and two Soreen Lunchbox loaves, which were 10.2g of CHO.  That’s 352.2g of carbohydrate over an 8-hour period.  I had 12 units of insulin over this period, 10.9iu as basal insulin, this rest as corrective boluses.  This is not normal eating: the gels are absorbed easily; I don’t even have to chew them.  They contain salts and taste nice.  It meant, I could just use water during the ride, and I had nearly 6litres of water.

From 7am onwards, I didn’t eat anything else until after the ride had finished.

It wasn’t all plain sailing: there were some serious crashes, so a couple of the hills were closed off.  Having been in a bad cycle accident, I hope the riders involved recover soon.  I met many other crazy riders, including some raising money for Diabetes UK and JDRF.  Some of them were a bit shocked I was “riding on my own” but I really wasn’t, what with the marshals, the other riders, the JDRF team and of course my husband, I was far from my own.

I had planned to have rests at the “hubs” food, drink and toilet stations.  As I was one of the last “waves” to set off, I didn’t get the chance to stop at the first one (“you won’t complete the course in time to do 100miles”) which happened at the 3^rd hub too.  Thankfully, I was self-sufficient sugar-wise and in the Surrey hills a really nice gentleman was filling everyone’s water bottles up, which meant I didn’t need to ration my water.

Easy, peasy then!

I had a small issue with my phone – it dropped out of its holder on mile 72.  Being a newish phone, I stopped, which caused my rear wheel to lock.  Having gone down during a rain shower on the 18^th July and cracked a rib, I released the brake and sat the bike back upright.  I pulled over to the side and stopped better.  Only, while I had remembered that I had a proper cleat pedal on the left hand pedal all the times I’d stopped before, my mind was on my phone and down I went.

One cleat and one not

One cleat?  What are you on about?

I am a type 1 diabetic and reasonably uncoordinated and since my accident in 2017, not that confident on a push bike.

I had bought two cleat pedals and a pair of shoes to use them, but to be honest, I toppled over a couple of times which left me a sobbing wreck.  I’d said I’d ride a 100miles and cleats would help me achieve that, so I had to find an alternative way to make cleats work for me.

The answer I came up with 7 weeks ago was one cleat pedal and one non-cleat pedal.  I means I look a complete wally as my shoes are odd, but I get all the advantages to wearing the cleats, especially on the hills, but a lot less time spent having to plan to come out of the cleats to stop.  Only I forgot when I dropped my phone.

Thankfully, it was a topple at zero miles an hour and I was wearing full length lycra trousers, so nothing worse than bruising to my skin and pride and the case my phone was in kept it safe and sound.   A very kind cyclist and the marshal I went down in front of both helped me get back on the saddle.

You did it then

I did.  With hindsight, I did need one extra pack of gel, so 13 rather than 12 and hold my nerve just before 3pm so I don’t correct.  That would have meant I could avoid or treat the hypo at the end, the stop and then walk just used up the last of my energy.  I need to figure out my phone too, so the battery lasts the whole 8hours.  I overate at the picnic, a big thank you to the JDRF support team who looked after the 103 riders for JDRF – I was one of 24 who was type 1!

Unofficially I did it in 7hours 48minutes of riding.  I am waiting on confirmation from the organisers on their measurements.

Would I do it again?  A bit early to say.  It felt pretty good finishing and basically, I pretty much made food and insulin work for me, but it did take a long time getting there 😀

If this has inspired you, I will put down all my training and approach down for other type 1s to do this themselves. Plus there’s always the place to sponsor me to raise money for JDRF: https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/SamJWatkins – JDRF fund type 1 diabetes research to improve lives and one day eradicate the condition for good.  Your support makes this happen.

I’m a night owl, have been ever since I was born. My peak part of the day (and when I have the lowest insulin requirements) is just after lunch. (Image from wikipedia, photographer is Thomas Roessler).

This is not at all compatible with having a serious career and indeed as a young teenager, I felt doomed to rushing to school having been up all night.

Then I had a couple of epileptic fits during the night: not uncommon in teenagers and we found my trigger was apartame – I haven’t had aspartame since 1986 as a result.  We know they are fits as my blood sugar was above 7mmol/l and there’s no way they were caused by hypos.  I do now get fits on the odd occassion with hypos but with the Libre and not having long acting insulin, they are really rare and again, only during sleep.

Because my fits were during the night, I had to have an EEG which only happen as an outpatient during broad daylight.  The man performing the test assured me I would sleep and he was right.  What you do is shut you mind down (some people call this meditation).  Picture black and stop any stray thoughts.

Since that afternoon, if my blood sugar is normal I can sleep.  By preference, I go to sleep at 2am and wake at 9:45am.  But I can get enough sleep to function if I want it and my blood sugar is below 6.5mmol/l, as measured by my Libre.

High blood sugar keeps me awake.  I check it at 8pm and do everything I can to bring it down as going to bed with it above 8mmol/l is a recipe for restlessness.

Hypos normally make me sleepy at night and I often just switch my pump off for 15-30minutes if my blood sugar is below 4mmol/l and only treat with food if it’s below 3mmol/l.  I find if I eat, it’s really hard to stop climbing above 7mmol/l which makes sleep difficult.

By preference, I don’t like to eat after 8pm.  I do drink: tea, water or a small measure of alcohol.  But if I do that to excess, I just wake up needing the loo!

So there you have it, the secret of becoming a lark instead of an owl.

(Thank you to Wikipedia for sharing this image from Bernard DUPONT).

By the way, I was screened twice for the epilepsy.  With aspartame in my system, I tested positive.  3 months without  any gave a negative result.  When I give up driving, I will try to see what aspartame does for me as a grown up until then I am avoiding it like the plague 🙂

There are 67 days before I head down to London and do the Prudential ride for the JDRF.

According to fitbit, I am now “good-excellent” in terms of my general fitness although I have put on a little weight the past few weeks (bad hay fever, so have been adjusting my basal rates rather than all out cycling).

Tomorrow, I am looking to cover 70-80 miles – I am thinking about heading out to Felixstowe and the follow route 51 to Thurston (41miles) or Bury (45miles).  From there, I can head back home making 70odd miles.

I’m now holding a pretty steady 13mph, peaking to 22mph on the absolute flat.  Up-hill, I’m still slow but can easily hold 4mph on a seriously steep hill.

My recovery time is much better, less than 6 hours for the long rides.  My legs are amazing, I have contoured muscles – I am not 100% sure they are necessarily pretty, but there’s very little spare flesh on there.  My stomach is stronger too.

My routine is now to cycle for 10miles or a maximum hour then have a draw of water and a glucose gel – I can pretty reliably do that while pedalling.  My water lasts for about 30miles.  That’s a big break for me – 10-20 mins, more than a gel pack: I like Soreen Lunch-box loaves and a mini-coke.  30g of CHO and a good stretch.  I tend to stand as most of my journey has been sitting 🙂

That’s the plan tomorrow.  The first time I’m testing it over 65miles.

As a type 1 diabetic, life can seem very unfair despite some fantistic legislation which should give us a fair playing field.

I should be protected by law when my blood sugar impacts my behaviour: I keep good records and can demonstrate where my blood sugar varies outside the norm.

However, in practice, this is not generally treated as anything but an excuse.  I have been called lazy because I have turned up to work after a massive hypo late – “can’t you set an alarm clock correctly” and comments about having to pop out to get some food to correct a low blood sugar.

However, the Equality Act 2010 says that is not appropriate behaviour from a company or its representatives but this still happens.

It doesn’t help that because of headlines such as.

Because obviously, I want to be ill, I want to be diabetic otherwise I would be doing everything I could to reverse it.

Only, despite being a grown up now, I cannot reverse it – no-one can because I have an autoimmune disease.  Every so often, I think I have enough evidence to say that my body leaves enough working cells to make a difference for a few hours in a day (normally leading to a massive hypo) but that tends to be when other things are happening like getting over a different infection.

Those days are not trivial and the impact can last several days.  But never longer than those few precious hours once every couple of years.

I would stave to “avoid diabetes” but it doesn’t make any difference, likewise I would give up meat.

But there is no point, because nothing works long term.  If I do anything, I need insulin.

Interestingly, given all the hype in the media, only 40% of type 2 diabetes benefit from losing weight long term.  So that doesn’t seem like a battle you can win either.

Interestingly, my consultant wrote a letter which explains the impact high blood sugar has on me and why I strive so hard to have euglycemic control.  He feels all diabetics should be treated with empathy and compassion.

It would be great if, as the Equality Act 2010, employers would do that.

This is a quick update, not least because of cold/hay fever, I’ve had to take a couple of weeks out of the schedule.

On paper at least, I’m ahead of the game.  I am up to 60miles in 5 hours 35 minutes and doing that pretty confidently.  I can actually cycle.

The first hour sees my body dumping out sugar.  That needs to be replaced after that.

Heat has not been such a problem though I do tend to run out of liquid the first 50 miles.  Both of these issues can be fixed.  Torq gels give me 30g of CHO in a form I can use while riding.  There’s one that tastes of cherry Bakewell tart only no texture or crumbs or anything.  It’s very odd.

I’m still favouring coke and Soren mini loaves for my breaks and meals.  That stops me getting the shakes.  Weirdly, I have normal blood sugar (that’s to a suitable basal), but no energy which makes it really hard to cycle.  The glucose definitely helps at this point.

That’s nice, so what’s next?

I’m spreading my wings a bit.  100km is next or 67miles to you and me, along a country route.  That’s 60 km short of my final run, but I should be up to doing that in 5 hours 33minutes according to Ride GPS.

It’s still cold out there: only getting up to 14ºC and there’s a bit of wind, but that should mean I keep cool.

I’ll carry 2 litres of water with me, six 150ml cans of coke and six Soreen.  4 gel packs.  From the first 15miles, I’ll alternate coke and Soreen with gel every 10 miles.

I wear padded shorts and use a gel pad on the bike.  Together that should keep me comfortable.

I carry a spare battery for my phone too.

One thing I’ve noticed as the year has progressed is I’m still having trouble with air in-take.  Even my nasal douches aren’t touching the sides and I just drip from the first couple of miles out.  I guess paracetamol would help, but if I do that, I cannot use my Libre for my blood sugar measuring and that has been the best tool yet.

Not only during the ride (it can get so cold that it won’t work!) but for the recovery afterwards, preventing the muscle filling hypos.

Better stop typing, I need to get cycling 🙂

Over the past few months, I’ve been discussing reducing our energy footprint and especially our bill.

Really this is about achieving the best bang for your buck and is one of the reasons the world is looking to incentivise reducing our carbon and other emissions.

We were lucky and did this early enough that we get a good return on our installation from August 2014.  That means our installation costing £6,000 has generation between £500 and £800 per annum which means they have covered half they’re installation costs.  That’s ignoring what we’re saving in terms of reduced electricity costs (and we’re possibly not sweating the assests enough because we’re not using any spare electricity in a planned way – if we’re in excess we tend to cook bread, doing a load of washing or charge the car.

Take this month, May 2019.  We’re 11 days in and we’ve charged the car once, done 10 loads of washing, cooked normally and switched lights on when it’s dark.

Let’s compare that to what we’ve generated.

You can see from the numbers, we are generating more than we are using but because we’re not making use of our energy, we are having to pay around £40 a month for electricity.  That’s the case between April and August most years.

Which makes a battery very tempting.  At full utilisation, we generate 850Wh for a number of hours.  If we compare that to the cooker or microwave, 3 hours charge when it’s sunny would give us free electricity for cooking during the day.

But such a battery would need to cost in.  We’re paying £600 a year for our electricity.  We could go down to near zero with a battery without having to go off grid: but a Tesla Powerwall 2 has a suggested cost of £7,900.  That would take 13 years to pay off and that’s if it lives up to the promise and we do not charge the car at home (we’d be looking to double the money otherwise!).

It promises to cover us for a week of no sun, if the battery is fully charged but then it is assuming we use 12kWh, which means no charging the car.

We’ve gone for a system with inverters built into the solar cells which means we make electricity if only one cell is generating unlike systems with a single inverter.  We’d be binning part of our solution and may risk our feed in tariff by making such a big change.

One of Tesla’s competitors in the home battery market is Nissan whose X-Storage system can use old Nissan Leaf batteries.  This brings the cost for a 12kWh battery down to £6,750 (though they do not quote installation!).

Of course, it would be much cheaper to reduce our energy costs with a solar heater for the hot water and heating…

We moved house 7 years ago (almost to the date) and got a bit of a shock when our first month’s energy bill came in – our electric bill was £101.  For a month.

My friends are all groaning at this point, as I tell of how I sat in the kitchen looked up to the ceiling and realised what was burning the electrons.  27 50W halogens in the ceiling and 12 20W ones under the cabinets.

As you know, we swapped out the halogens for LEDs and gradually made a number of changes including getting solar panels 5 years ago.

Today, we can tie our electricity use to our charging – a smart meter is allowing us to tune our usage which has brought our monthly consumption down to £40 during the period we were using £100.

Sitting in the dark then?

Not at all.  Smart lighting comes on as the sunsets in two rooms: the hallway and lounge.  Partly, as this is where we live but also as a welcome to us as we come home during the winter but also to show the house is occupied.

Task lighting in the kitchen is now all LED as is the cooker hood.  If we have all the LEDs on, they use less than 2 of the old 50W halogens, but to be honest, you never need that much light!  Task lighting for working and overhead lights for chilling.  Lights power down automatically at night ensuring little waste and no stubbing of toes.

So what about the other power source, gas?

Good question.  Swapping out the Honeywell analogue thermostats for programmable ones, we have full control over all our zones.  I haven’t had the chance yet to swap out our radiator valves upstairs but compared to other similar houses, we running about 25% of their costs as one of the things our supplier does is show you that comparison!

To help with air quality, we are using the log fire less.

Not so bad.  Doesn’t the electric car hurt all this?

Not at all.  When we do charge the car, we spend £4 a day instead of between £1 and £2.  On a dull day, when we cannot charge the car from the solar power we are generating.

That’s a hundred miles for £2 max or 2p a mile.  That’s cheap motoring compared to £1.33 for a litre of diesel.

At home, we have used 430 kWh of energy for the car over the past six months for 46 charging sessions: that’s roughly 8 charges a month or two a week at 18p a session or £84.28 for six months of driving for a 1,000 miles (we have charged else where, but that’s been for free).

Doing OK then?

I think so.  I’m not saying being off the grid wouldn’t be great, as would be using solar to heat our water during the summer, but we are definitely doing out bit.  In 2018 we used 3.9MWh in electricity and 21MWh in gas.  Annually, 805kWh of that was used to travel 4k miles.  We cycle and walk where we can to help keep congestion down too.

Our fridge may be coming to the end of its life, which would help us reduce the daily costs too.

My name is Sam J Watkins and since I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1977 at the age of four I have been bone crushingly tired.

This phrase was used by a politician returning to the Scotish Parliament after the birth of her child.

I had a baby in 2000 and the lowering of my blood sugar caused by breast feeding meant that for once, I always had normal blood sugar when I went to bed which allowed me to get substantially more sleep than my average 5 hours.  For four months, I had continuously good sleep patterns.  Then I stopped breast feeding.

High blood sugar (hyperglycemia) for me is anything above 6.8mmol/l when I am trying to sleep.  It causes dehydration, brain swelling, lack of energy, mood swings, frequently needing to visit the toilet and when higher, physical pain.  This is because glucose in my blood is being forced out not used by the body.

Ironically, not sleeping can then raise blood sugar as it causes stress (dehydration, brain swelling etc).  I test more after 8pm than any other time of the day because getting that right increases my chances of getting a good nights sleep.

But along with high blood sugar, low blood sugar (anything below 4mmol/l) causes its own issues including night sweats, panic, fitting, headaches and the need to treat which can lead to high blood sugar.  Treating a suspected low before sleep is easier for me as I’m on a pump than it would be if I were injecting but a sudden drop in the night can lead to a nightmare which wakes me up.  Typically that’s between 2 and 4am.

Sleep deprivation

Lack of sleep has been studied: it damages health because this is the key time the human body repairs.

It harms the brain, causing cognitive impairment and depression.

It impacts learning.  This is before we take in to account the whole impact of high and low blood sugar on the brain.

Many low term diabetics state the condition is like having a demanding toddler on their back 24/7.  Because until we get a good period that’s what it is like.

What can you do?

Generally, I roll with the punches.  The summer is always bad for me as I have hayfever – if I don’t use antihistamine, I have high blood sugar and if I do use it, I have very low blood sugar, so in the spring, I have a major adjustment to my insulin levels.  Again the pump helps me do that.

I use a fit bit to track sleep (which is how I know about the levels.  5 hours is very typical, a brilliant night is anything over 6.5 and a very poor one is barely 3hours and that’s without the physical impact of the high and low blood sugars).

I also use a Freestyle Libre to continuously monitor my blood sugar and painlessly check what’s going on.  It also doesn’t need callibrating.  Unlike other CGMS, it doesn’t beep at me which means, if it’s got it wrong, it doesn’t beep incessently and doesn’t beep to require callibration.

Which means, even if I cannot sleep, I can at least see what is happening.

Last night, by the way, was perfect.

On Friday, Mark Wild, Chief Executive from Crossrail spoke these immortal words – while we understand the engineering, the software is completely new and is performing a complex task. We don’t know how it is going to perform.

Today’s computer systems are hugely complex and consist of interlocking pieces which need to work together perfectly.  Each interface is defined and tested but the tests are usually incomplete.  Why?  Well, as a programmer, I test against what I have designed and delivered.  That’s a flawed test compared to its experience in the wild and all the multitude of things that can happen.  Crossrail’s software is a complex set of algorithms ensuring trains cross other railway systems, roads and paths without any collisions.  There are weather systems that can impact how that performs alongside other parameters.  It’s not trivial and often will have built in overrides: if it doesn’t get right, who will save the day?

I’ve been designing interfaces that allow the experiences of the users to be evaluated and then we can go back and ask whether the tools provide maximum benefit.

This is an important step: as a designer solving a problem, I can answer as much as I can but that’s not the same as it being of most use and benefit.

What are you saying?  Is the job never done?

I don’t think it necessarily is: the more I interact with users, the more I learn but that is not what many companies are doing.

For me, the more you use computers, see the good, the bad and the downright ugly, the more you improve your output and environments.