Washington DC Update

I was very excited to get back into my groove and start getting up ealry to go to the gym. I went to sleep last night around ten o’clock and was all set for today. When my alarm went off at 6:20, I wasn’t exactly feeling it to go to the gym. 1 word- TIRED! I thought it would be enough sleep, and as my posting time for tonight will prove, I know where that extra of hour of sleep went. In either case, I was extreamly slow on the getup this morning and eventually rolled into work around 9:15.

My day was packed full of odd tasks and I am really starting to see how it’s almost like big business and the requirements for a large company to run correctly actually create more work for everyone. I wanted to get a phone installed in my office, but in order to do that I had to order it off the Banks Intranet. Sounds simple right? Well, in order to long onto their secure site and have them know who I am, I have to login using one of the 20 million passwords the bank has given me. If you messup 3 times, your get locked out of the system for security reasons. I remember resetting all of my passwords to this one common password, however this one either never got swapped or some other mystery reason. Well, I got locked out- which then required an extra hour on someone elses phone (since I still can’t order mine) to get my password reset. I then come to find out that HR has my birthday month off by one digit- a clear typo in my mind, but oh no, I have to jump through a whole new set of hoops to prove to them I am who I am!. I mean, talk about small things that… well, you know.

When it’s all finished, I ordered my phone, got my password reset and HR can now send me a punctual birthday card. Another interesting lesson I leared today is how it’s my job to guess and pre-guess what my bosses will need. Nick, Eric’s boss (my bosses boss) will be going on a mission to Africa. Eric told me that Nick loves to throw you seven hours of work two hours before he has to leave. A perk that comes with the territory, I guess. Well it’s my job to be ready for nearly anything he could bring to us. Thus meaning I need a plan if he says X and a backup if he says Y and all of my plans need to be setup technologically so that it can go either path without problems. I went back to my workstation and made many different video file formatts and tested them within Microsoft Powerpoint so I am ready if he wants digital video in his presentations. He dosent leave until the 13th, so I will be ready for anything by then.

At 5:45, a consultant directly above me who used to be an intern, Asiha, droped off five hours of DV video to be encoded by tomorrow morning. Saying how this is a pretty simple process of hitting play on a camcorder and record on the computer, I didn’t mind except it’s 5 freaking tapes! That means i have to sit there and wait for each hour of tape to play and get saved into the Computer. (I’m sure their logic is – hey lets waste the interns time, and to be honest with you, that’s what I would do too!) Lucky for me I was going to Dance lessons tonight so I had something constructive to do while the machine was busy downloading this movie. Every hour or so I would run upstairs and swap out the old tape for a new one and keep the cycle going. I left tonight at 9:30 PM and had four of the five tapes finished and ready for export. Although I was actually “at work” for more than 12 hours today, the Dance Lessons, Lunch, and Dinner don’t count. I actually ended up only working ~9.5 hours today (not bad to keep everyone happy).

So it’s now midnight and time for some sleep. I’m driving to philly after work tomorrow to spend my 4th with my bro’s and visit Gregory. (He was in BL1, FYI) He is planning a huge “Graduation Party” and he has hyped it up so much it would be crazy for me to miss it. It better be good too, in order to make up for all of my time he has wasted telling me how good it’s going to be. (P.S. You knows i loves you gibby)