The intellectual equivalent of a ham sandwich.

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Weekly Wacko (57)

Impressively Unimportant

During my sophomore year of college I felt that it was important that I find an internship, and then spend the summer dazzling the world with my fancy intern-capabilities. Or at least the prestigious company I would be interning with. And if not them, then my imagination.

A civil engineering firm that specialized in sewer plans and waste water treatment plant designs took me under its wing. I would be working in the Phoenix office, doing intern-type stuff.

However, this was not how I had imagined it.

I had a phone interview where I said, essentially, I would love to do any work and I love learning about anything and everything. This is not exactly true. Yes, I enjoy learning. “Anything and everything,” though, seems a bit ambitious.
It turns out, I do not particularly enjoy trying to read the handwriting of various people, and then typing what they wrote so that a potential sewer plan could better be developed.

Unfortunately sometimes, I have a good imagination. My imagination tossed logic aside and created amazing scenarios for me to envision happening during the internship. Maybe I would discover the cure to cancer, solve world hunger and make a mean cup of coffee, all on my first day as an intern. I had lofty thoughts – I knew these probably wouldn’t happen, but I hoped for big things.

Instead, I was an intern. And I use that word with the least possible significance it can receive.

However, I had no idea how little impact I had until the last week of work before I would leave to go back to school to start my junior year.

I was assigned the high-priority task of going to a store to get some cardboard boxes. I headed out and was confronted with a problem – what size box! My God! These sorts of details are important to interns!

Over the summer I had been assigned tasks of so little importance that I had to find details somewhere to fret over. “You said you wanted this printed out, Mr. Johnson, but did you want this printed out from the printer up here? Or the printer downstairs?”

No matter how insignificant my task was, I found questions that needed to be answered.

They loved it, I’m sure.

I called my immediate supervisor, a very patient (thank God) woman named Gina. She was not around. Should I call the boss-boss? Or the boss-boss-boss? No, this wasn’t that important.

Instead I called Sukru, a guy who had just started working there that summer. Sukru was one of a small group of people who were in charge of creating “tasks” for me (“I don’t know what to make him do! Is there a clever way we can tell him to play solitaire all the time but make it sound important?”). Every day I saw Sukru. Every day I said hello to him.

Every day I, apparently, made no impact on him at all.

I called the main line and asked to be connected to his desk.

“Hello …”
“Hey, Sukru, how’s it going?”
“Ehh … Good … Thanks …”
“So I’m just wondering what size boxes I should get?”
“Ehh … I am very sorry … Who is this?”
“Oh, sorry. It’s Brad.”
“Who?”
“… Brad … (last name) …”
“…”
“From down. The halllll …” (approximately three cubicles away).
“Ohhh!”

Interns of the world – don’t get your hopes up.

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Weekly Wacko (56)

Make Someone Feel Uncomfortable Day 2010

Thanks to my friend Theresa for sharing this link with me about Make Someone Feel Uncomfortable Day 2010. I’m touched that I am associated with creating awkward situations.

Story One: Making Others Uncomfortable

The summer between my 8th and 9th grade years my dad’s side of the family had a HUGE family reunion. A massive amount of Stanleys.

We did all kinds of things but one night we all gathered and sat in this big barn-type room (we were at some very nature-y place in Colorado for the reunion). Everyone was there (minus probably a few old people who had already gone to sleep). We did a few things, and then it came time for …

Family Facts!

Every person in the room would take a turn standing up and telling a little known fact about ‘us Stanleys.’ (If my memory serves correctly – my memory verifier here, aka my mom, was not available.) This whole process was not delightful for me whatsoever. Public speaking. Public speaking at an event where other people were telling jokes and getting laughs. Oh, I had to get a laugh! I just had to!

I remember two facts given. Mine. And my mom’s. My mom’s was funny. Mine …

“A little known fact about [last name] … is that they’re like cockroaches … even if you cut off their head they keep living, and talking …, for weeks.” [Again – I’m not sure exactly about my mom’s joke but I know I was a big fan.] But, if you’re curious – that is a fact about roaches.

Mine: “A little known” (odd licking motion) “fact about us” (again odd licking motion) “is that we’re part snake.”

Yuck. Blech. Gross. My joke TANKED. I would guess that most people just thought I was a weirdo who licked my face a lot, and the confidence-shattering silence across the room probably made me mumble the ‘punch line.’

There you go – I stood up and called my family a bunch of snakes while licking my face excessively. Congratulations to me.

Story Two: Being Uncomfortable because of Someone Else

One time during college the girl I was dating found out that I didn’t really like the word ‘panties.’  [Another friend of mine found the word ‘supple’ to be very uncomfortable, so of course when I found that out everything was described as being ‘supple’ in varying degrees.]

The then-girlfriend found out about the word panties right before we got to the grocery store. My new nickname for that hour was, of course, panties.

“Do you need milk, panties?”
“Hey that cereal is on sale – don’t you like that stuff … panties?”
“Hey panties I’m in this lane checking out! … Panties! … Panties in lane 7. Yes, you, panties!”

The End

There you have it – two uncomfortable situations. They’re both simple enough, harmless to everyone but me (and those hit by my awkward shock-waves). Have a great Make Someone Uncomfortable Day 2010, and a good weekend!

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Weekly Wacko (55)

(Note: This is really not that interesting, but the ‘weekly wacko’ section serves as a diary for me and I wanted to write out how I felt about this. Also, I wrote this 11/9/10.)

Hello Again, Feelings …

Today was a fairly big day for me. Since I love telling stories I of course can’t just tell what. I have to tell why.

Last week I came back from my trip to Florida and worked on Friday. I saw that my boss had his door open so I swung by to tell him that since NASA had not launched the shuttle, I needed the Lego Shuttle set to comfort my wounded heart and spirit.

“Ohh! Yeah, I’m surprised I haven’t bought that yet.”

My boss is cool.

He didn’t say he would buy the Lego set for his kid – he’d be buying it for himself. He then pulled up the Lego website and complained that they misrepresented the size of the shuttle. We tried to figure out how big it would be, and decided that it’d be cool, but even cooler if it was 5 feet tall.

After that he asked me to sit down. I am a worrier and a pessimist so this made me nervous. I asked if I should close the door and he said yes. Yikes.

I came to Houston on a one-year contract: January to January. At some point I began working on another project outside the one I was hired into. This project was(/is?) slated to be finished in March so I approached my boss (actually I talked to 3 bosses about this – gooo corporate!) and asked about the idea of extending my contract until March. I got a thumbs up. This was a few weeks ago.

On Friday, I was sitting there and the first question from my boss was, “how do you like working here? Be honest.”

Double yikes.

I told him I enjoyed it, but lately the changing scope of the work (the economy and I are enemies) had sucked the enjoyment out. Currently the feeling is: “you can do that, it doesn’t matter anyway because this project might be trashed, so sure … go do that.”

He told me my name had come up for a new project that is just getting underway. It’s an intense one, it’ll be a big challenge, you know, that old bag of tricks. Nevertheless, it’s exciting and was a boost to my ego to be wanted for this team (though it’ll be a huge team so not that big a boost).

He told me to think the idea over during the weekend. I thought, and talked with my folks, and thought some more. My gut feeling was yes please and Occam’s razor told me go for it – but I felt like there should be some down-sides I was missing.

On Monday I met with another boss who talked with me about it some more. When I said, “this sounds like it’ll be very challenging work,” he laughed at me. An, “oh you poor, ignorant fool,” laugh. My bosses are piloting me across the river Styx.

Today I met with boss number 1 (Lego boss – who informed me that boss number two is a karate whiz and probably sits around thinking of ways to break people’s necks. Again, Lego boss is awesome). Lego boss was being pushed to get an answer from me and I … said yes.

Yikes!

The project may fail, it has a nebulous shape at best, it’ll be very challenging and this worries me because I don’t want to look dumb. But my desire to not look stupid does not outweigh my desire to be a part of this. I emailed my sister and told her that the two downsides to my accepting this offer are: fear of not being good enough/fear of the unknown, and not getting to move to a cooler place or closer to home. Sorry Houston, don’t mean to hate on you.

My sister had a very nice response which was: “Duuuuuude that is so awesome. take a moment to be positive before you start bashing yourself.”

This is my being positive. Congratulations, self. Don’t blow it.

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